DISK IS LIKELY TO FAIL SOON - failing now

Question

I have a dual boot of Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04. Recently I upgraded it to 18.04. As soon as I did it, it started showing DISK IS LIKELY TO FAIL SOON (37° C / 99° F).

I checked the status of my disk via Windows and it shows it’s perfectly healthy. I assumed the error occurred because my partition size of Ubuntu was 64GB (which I now increased to 86GB). Please help me out with this.

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Edit: The results of smartctl - attributes

Solution 1

As smartctl output suggests you have "16600" reallocated sectors on your disk, which is really high for the number of bad sectors on a disk.

Reallocated_sctor_ct is a Pre-fail property and its threshold for your device is "30" however your device status indicates a really bad number: "1".

It may not fail right away (or might) however you will definitely lose a lot of data if you keep using it.

Take a backup as soon as it's possible for you, and take the device to warranty if it has any.

Solution 2

In the bad old days before SMART, you HDD failed with uncorrectable errors and data was lost. No warning, no alerts, just poof it fails without warning.

Now SMART tells you it relocating sectors before the drive fails with uncorrectable errors. This gives you a warning and time to rescue your data.

SMART statistics come from the hard drive, re-installing the OS doesn't help. Drive is starting the fail. Eventually it will fail with an uncorrectable error.

Using the that drive is like driving a car with an oil light turned on. Eventually it will stop working and leave you stranded; you can get your car serviced to take care of the warning for far less than the cost of a new car. You can do the same by sending in your drive to a data recovery service and they can "clean" the drive for several hundred dollars. It's not cost effective to fix the drive, just buy a new one.

Bear in mind that you're probably getting relocated sectors because the inside of the drive has contaminants. These will spread until there's no more sectors to relocate data to, at which point you will get an unrecoverable error. Continue using the drive at you own risk.

Comments

[Ravexina]

First run sudo apt install smartmontools -y and then edit your question and add the output of this command sudo smartctl --attributes /dev/sda

[Shrisha Bharadwaj]

I have attached it

[Shrisha Bharadwaj]

I have taken a back up already. But is there a fix? Can I replace anything? I do not have a warranty.

[Ravexina]

The only way is to replace this drive

[Shrisha Bharadwaj]

This drive as in, the HDD?

[Ravexina]

Yep, you have to replace your hard disk.

[Shrisha Bharadwaj]

Just out of curiosity, will it help if I delete my partition and add ubuntu again?

[Ravexina]

Sadly No, its a hard ware failure ...

[Zeiss Ikon]

As a bonus, it's very likely you can buy a replacement hard disk (or solid state drive) that's both bigger and faster than your old one, for (much) less than you paid for the old one. Those of us who've been doing this a while remember when 20 MB hard disks cost hundreds of dollars (those a little older than me might remember smaller capacity than that for thousands). Now you can buy multi-terabyte platter drives for under a hundred, and terabyte SSD for not much over a hundred.