Hello All,
After months of singing praises of Linux, finally I got the customer to try it out. It was on an existing M$ system that had been running since its installation for 4 years. It had survived some power breaks in the past and was running smoothly.
In order to avoid touching his data, I loaded Kubuntu 5.10 on the fourth partition of the hdd. During installation in progress it did show a couple of error messages that some files ( That looked like M$'s system restore files ) were reporting different block sizes and I chose the option ignore as I had already cleaned his last partition.
The installation went smoothly and I was able to boot into Linux as well as M$ a couple of times and even backed up the last drop of his data after that. Then I went on to demonstrate the bootup screen and how to choose between the system and the system was booted into linux. It got stuck at kernel panic. After a forced reset, the bios gave an error for the hdd. Instead of the entire text of the hdd label like 'Samsung ......', it only showed a garbled 2 character text. After the next restart, it disappeared altogether and right now I am in a situation thats commonly known as 'la$@# lag gayey'.
Since I am promoting linux free of cost, as a community propaganda, providing a free HDD along with linux is a bit expensive and I would like to know some things as mentioned below.
1) Can this HDD be reprogrammed or forced with a low level format? Right now the bios cannot even detect it. 2) Is there any software that detects the health of a HDD before it can be loaded with Linux? 3) What could have gone wrong in this case and what precautions do I need to take to avoid such mishaps in future?
Regards,
Rony.
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