How to boot from grub? Harddisk failure?

[s-ett]

And running sudo badblocks -v /dev/sda I got this.... so my harddisk is already ruined?

Checking blocks 0 to 976762583
Checking for bad blocks (read-only test): 1024
1025
1026
1027
476010632
476010633
476010634
476010635
481332520
481332521
481332522
481332523
481332964
481332965
481332966
481332967
514029876
514029877
514029878
514029879
519273124
519273125
519273126
519273127
done
Pass completed, 24 bad blocks found. (24/0/0 errors)

[oldfred]

In Disks and icon in upper right corner is Smart Status.
What does that say about drive.

A few bad blocks is somewhat normal, but a increasing number is drive failure.

[s-ett]

It says: Disk is OK, 48 bad sectors. All SMART Attributes are marked as either old-age or pre-fail though, so I presume it won't be OK much longer. I'm running a self-test now just to see what it says.

I already backed up everything I think is important. But is there a way to see what files are potentially damaged?

Here's how it looks like
https://i.imgur.com/nRhYJWn.png




Finished the extended test now, and it said it failed

[s-ett]

Anyone knows?

[dragonfly41]

Since I don't know the answer (some time since I experienced a bad HDD and I now use SSD) a simple google search found this ..

https://superuser.com/questions/2474...clusters-whate

which refers to ddrescue to scan.

[oldfred]

TheFu posted this which explains some of HDD failure modes.
What a Failing HDD looks like
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2446974

[s-ett]

Since most of the errors were from the NTFS partition, I tried chkdsk with Windows first, here's the result
https://pastebin.com/p8pYwYyM
I'll keep trying to fix things, including the stuff you said. Or do you think I have to replace it anyway?

[oldfred]

When a drive starts to look a bit flaky or is more than a few years old, I demote it to one of my backups.
I do not have the high end drives like TheFu discusses, just regular consumer grade. And even if a 5 yr warrantee, I often upgrade to a new drive. Lately been adding SSDs as my new faster replacements.

Backups still important whether drive is old or new.

With HDD, the deleted/changed data is often still there and recoverable with various tools. But SSDs run trim and that in effect housecleans all old data.