It all started after a couple of power outages last month. Windows would no longer load (have a Windows XP desktop that I got in 2008). I installed Ubuntu and it ran great for about a month, then took a shit after the most recent Firefox update. Now it won’t boot in any version of Ubuntu, and I can’t get it to even finish booting from disk as a re-install of Ubuntu.
it keeps giving me an error message about not being able to install SCSI 0,0,0 on devsda, or something. I’ve tried devsdb, devsdc, and, although I got it to intall on devsdc, it wouldn’t boot up correctly when i restarted.
According to one post I found online about devsda issues generally meaning hard drive failure, plus the fact that Windows went down after those 3 power failures, I’m thinking that my hard drive is screwed.
I don’t have anything important saved on there, so that’s no problem.
However, I’d like to get a few more years out of this machine. How simple is it to just buy a new hard drive and install it myself? Could I buy one off the shelf that would be compatible with this 4-year-old motherboard?
If not, I’m just going to say “fuck it” and just use the laptop for a few years, and give up on the the desktop.
It’s the easiest thing in the world, and hard drives are cheap too.
Get a hard drive from Walmart or Newegg, and open up the case, find your hard drive and take it out. Put the new one in the same way you took the old one out.
If it’s the laptop, there’s usually a square hunk of plastic you can unscrew with a label that looks like three disks. Either way it’s just a matter of a couple of screws and either plugging in the right cables (desktop) or sliding it into a socket the right way (laptop). Make sure you get a 2.5" HD for your laptop, and 3.5" for your desktop.
Now if you have one of those fancy new Macs with soldered-on SSDs or something, you’re going to have to talk to a Genius.
A four-year-old mother board will probably have the current hard drive interface, SATA. If so you can just purchase a new drive (get one online, they’re a lot cheaper than a store), plug it in, and load the OS of your choice (remember about XP’s product activation). If it’s the older interface, IDE, you can still find tons of these on eBay. Even new ones.
Easy way to tell:
[ul][li]**IDE **drives have a wide ribbon data cable & connector and a white plastic molex power connector.[/li][li]**SATA **drives have a thin (usually red) data cable and small black data connector & even smaller black power plug.[/li][/ul]
Pretty much every internal consumer hard drive has been SATA for 6-8 years now. I’ve never had an incompatibility issue with a hard drive, although I suppose it’s theoretically possible. I just buy them off the shelf based on size and price.
I should also mention that it sounds like there are software problems, and you might possibly fix those. You know, it might not be the HD at all. Either way, you can get your data off of the HD if you want it, even if you can’t boot from it.
Finally, I think your install CD for ubuntu is bad. Try some other live disc, or maybe Filezilla or Bart PE, or try booting from a USB drive. Using any of those methods you could back up your data from the hard drive before you trash it.
Thanks. I’m pretty sure it’s the hard drive, though; the boot disk is the same one I used about 6 weeks ago.
I’m trying to decide if I even care enough to replace the hard drive. My laptop works great, and my wife and I are rarely online at the same time, so we don’t conflict with each other for computer time.
Replace a Hard disk in desktop computer is very simple you can buy one online and replace by yourself. But before you get you HDD replaced get it confirmed that its actually crashed else it might be some other issue as well.
What do you mean here? You re-installed Ubuntu to the hard drive, but it won’t boot from there? Or you can run Ubuntu off the CD, but it fails when you try to re-install it?
Or do you mean you can’t even get it to boot from the Ubuntu Live CD? If you can’t run the Live CD, I’d guess it was something other than the hard drive (I’d remove the hard drive, and try to boot from the CD to be sure).
It’s all about if you have the connector available. The MB might have 0, 1 or 2 (unlikely if new) IDE connectors. And if you have a connector, is it already in use, e.g, by a DVD drive? You don’t want to connect a HD and a DVD drive on the same cable. (Too slow.)
If you have no free IDE connector, you can get an SATA to IDE adapter. I use these and they are ~fine. Given a choice, hook the HD up to a IDE connector, and use the adapter for a DVD drive. But some MBs don’t allow booting off a HD on their lone IDE connector. (Which is really ratty on the MB maker’s part.)
To save the time and agony of reinstalling all your programs and files, you might spend a few more bucks and get a HDD enclosure. Then put the new drive in that and connect it to a USB port (you may need an extra USB cable).
Then get a program like Acronis True Image and you can clone the new drive from the old. It will have everything on it (even if it is larger than the old one), and it will be bootable.
You can continue to use Acronis for backups. It is an excellent program with many features. A mirror image backup will restore your drive to exactly as it was before, if you ever have a software disaster that bricks the computer.
Then swap the drives. You can continue to use the old one, as long as it lasts, for extra storage for files or backups.
If the hard drive is going I’m not sure I recommend this. I tried cloning a failing hard drive just a couple months ago with Clonezilla, and the entire OS install on the new drive was borked so I ended up just having to reinstall and copy all my backed up files anyway. I would have save a lot of time by just reinstalling everything to begin with.