HTPC Failure
The HTPC mysteriously failed this week. After selecting a load in Grub, it complained it couldn’t read init files. I tried loading the Ubuntu live on USB, but that wouldn’t load. Then on boot-up it would say “error: hd0 out of disk.” At first, I thought this was a problem with the USB load, but that worked on another computer. I changed the SATA mode in BIOS from AHCI to IDE and then the USB would load. It seems the USB wouldn’t load in AHCI mode and the “out of disk” error was coming from the hard disk, as without the USB drive inserted, that’s what I started seeing. Now it’s looking like a hard disk failure.
After Ubuntu booted from the USB drive, I opened a terminal and ran sudo fsck /dev/sda1. It found a bunch of errors, which I told it to fix.
On reboot, “error: sd0 out of disk.” Reloading from USB again, I ran the disk utility and looked at the SMART data for the drive. It showed 48 bad sectors, which is no big deal. The other parameters looked OK, so I ran the extensive self-test. As it was running, I noticed the read error count was 720,900! I think this disk needs to get replaced.