Ubuntu

Format failed, can't access hard disk

Asked by Hashdonkey

After getting an fdisk error 'unable to open /dev/sda' I followed a thread (on another forum) which suggested using Partition Manager to format to a single partition. Halfway through this the process failed and now I get pages of error messages when I try booting from the HDD. Fortunately I still have Ubuntu 8.10 on a flash disk so I can get in that way, but I'd really like to restore the system to it's original state. Any ideas where I should start? I've tried running fdisk again and get the same error message I did first time round. Thanks.

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midnightflash (midnightflash) said : 		#1

Huppa... seems to be a serious problem with your harddisk.
You should take a hardware-mans help for this I think.

Sorry for this.

Greetings
mid

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Jeruvy (jeruvy) said : 		#2

From a livecd, try and run smartmontools on the drive to determine if the drive has failed.

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Hashdonkey (kevin-relocationspecialists) said : 		#3

Thanks for the suggestions, I finally got around the problem by using Partition Manager to delete the old partition, rebooting from the USB, then setting up a new partition and formatting the drive.