I have a dell e1505 (inspiron 6400 I think) with many many problems. Its screen broke (twice), USB has mostly stopped working, the sound card seems to occasionally freeze the computer, and I thought it had HDD problems.
I believed this since programs in ubuntu would freeze (and gnome would gray them out) for often 20-60 seconds at a time periodically (and this got increasingly frequent). By the time I finally got a new computer, processes would often freeze one by one and stay frozen for minutes (both in XP and Ubuntu). Once recently, when booting up, ubuntu's disk-checker warned me of many corruptions and problems with my HDD and I chose to repair all the filesystem problems. So I'm pretty convinced the HDD is going bad.
Now, I'd like to turn this laptop into a server for random stuff. I figure the USB, sound, and LCD problems wont effect a server, so I'll just buy a new HDD on newegg for $40 and be on my way. I just today ran memtest86+ and it shows no memory errors, good, but I also ran e2fsck -n -f -v and it shows no bad blocks. I don't want a server that freezes up for minutes at a time, but I also don't want to shell out $40 for a new HDD when the problem lies elsewhere.
I just ran e2fsck -n -f -v -c and it printed a number of errors halfway through and says there are 2 bad blocks (out of millions).
My questions:
- Is this a bad harddrive? What else can I try to test the harddrive and see if it is bad?
- Is there anything else I should be testing that could have been the source of the poor performance?
Thanks!
Answer
Try monitoring the HDD with smartmon - more information here
This will actually check the HDD firmware to report on things like bad sectors, temperatures, etc. This has saved me a couple of times, letting me know that the HD was having problems.
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