On Sunday 19 March 2006 07:50 pm, Rony Bill wrote:
I am in a situation thats commonly known as 'la$@# lag gayey'.
ROTFLMAO ( Sorry for that but I've been working with C pointers for too long now ... )
- Can this HDD be reprogrammed or forced with a low level format?
Yep. Generally the harddisks come with a floppy disk or a CD which has such utils.
- Is there any software that detects the health of a HDD before it
can be loaded with Linux?
I think SMART was supposed to do this at the BIOS level but then I havent faced such a situation.
- What could have gone wrong in this case and what precautions do I
need to take to avoid such mishaps in future?
Some very weird bug must've caused this. I fear it might be the bootloader but then it's a shot it in the dark. Anyway, I always recommend people that they always use a separate harddisk when installing a new OS to be absolutely safe. This is after a very painful experience with FreeBSD about a year ago. If you don't have a separate harddisk then I would recommend only using a live CD or go for a rock solid distribution like Fedora, Debian, Slackware. Ubuntu has too many bleeding edge packages and is generally considered unstable.
Happy recovery! :)