[Wiltshire] Suspect hard drive infant mortality

[David Fletcher]

On Wed, 2020-11-18 at 16:12 +0000, Ralph Corderoy via Wiltshire wrote:
> Hi Dave,
> 
> I'd expect a problem with the hard drive to show up in the output of
> 
>     sudo smartctl -x /dev/sda
> 
> Otherwise, if the bytes from the disk don't match what the fsck
> expects
> then it sounds more like filesystem corruption by the wrong data
> being
> written rather than the drive returning different bytes to those
> originally stored.
> 
> -- 
> Cheers, Ralph.

I ended up doing a reformat and reinstall a couple of days ago. Then
ran the smartctl command you suggested. It produced a lot of output but
nothing obviously wrong. The laptop is syncing all my media files from
the server again which takes quite a while.

Seems very strange that the contents of the hard drive could possibly
get corrupted even though it's a laptop that therefore effectively has
its own UPS built in in the form of a battery. There's also an Acer
Aspire One Cloudbook 11 here, that I was supposed to dispose of as my
girlfriend had become tired of it. It's also running Mint 20 now, with
no problems except that I have to use a corded mouse because the
buttons on the laptop don't work.

Fingers crossed. Hope it doesn't screw up again while I'm away.

Dave