A couple of days ago, someone brought a computer to me to take a look at. They told me it was slow and they asked if I could fix it. Anyhow, I turned it on. It booted Ubuntu 10.10, got to the desktop and the screen went blank, then the desktop reappeared. Then every time I moved the cursor, it would do the same thing. Since I figured the OS was damaged, I was going to just install Windows 2000 on it. I then shut it down, hit the power button, went to the CMOS screen so it would pause booting and I put the CD in. I noticed in the Basic CMOS menu that the C: drive just said HARDDISK, not the brand or model or anything. I went ahead and booted from the CD and started formating the hard drive. It was EXTREMELY slow for just a 60 GB. 2 hours in, I was at 17%. I could not stay up all night with it so i canceled and shut it down. The next day, I went to retry. It would not format at all. I tried using a Win 98 boot disk with some utils on it, using FORMAT, FDISK, and SCANDISK. FORMAT kept saying that C: was not a valid drive specification and so did SCANDISK. FDISK told me that the hard drive may be damaged. I also distinctly remember something telling me something about head 0 could not be read.
Sounds like the hard drive is going bad, linux partition is different than windows and sometimes it takes a little bit stronger software to fix it. Plus you first must remove there boot manager.. You need partition magic to remove linux partitions and fix mbr.. or you need Hiren's Boot CD..
i figured something out today. i had an Ubuntu Live CD laying around and i put it in to see if i could get it to load. it gave me a repeating I/O error. it must be something to do with the circuitry or a chip or something on the hard drive. im thinking whoever had the computer before let the hard drive overheat and it must have fried something.
