How to detect a possible hardware error?

Question

I'm running Debian Wheezy on a HP Pavilion dv7 laptop and it freezes every now and then, requiring a reboot. One time it didn't even load the operating system, but it wasn't I who was using it so I can't tell what error was displayed. On a previous Windows 7 install it constantly failed to load Windows, throwing the user at the "attempting repairs" screen, which would do something for a few minutes and then say Windows couldn't fix the problem.

This leads me to think that there is a hardware problem, and I was wondering if there's anything at /var/log or somewhere else that could provide some info on what's going on, or if there's any test I could run, and what I should be looking for.

I issued

grep -i "error" /var/log

The full output is here. The only line I could understand and that I think might have something to do with the problem was

/var/log/dmesg.0:[   11.632723] [drm:radeon_pci_probe] *ERROR* radeon kernel modesetting for R600 or later requires firmware-linux-nonfree.

But

lspci | grep -i vga

Returns

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Whistler XT [AMD Radeon HD 6700M Series]

And System > System Settings > Details > Graphics shows Intel(R) Sandybridge Mobile is being used. So I guess the error was "solved" by using the onboard graphics card?

There was also

/var/log/syslog.1:Apr 19 20:14:09 magui kernel: [    1.087417]  pci0000:00: ACPI _OSC request failed (AE_ERROR), returned control mask: 0x1d
/var/log/syslog.1:Apr 19 20:14:09 magui kernel: [    8.510757] ata1.00: irq_stat 0x08000000, interface fatal error
/var/log/syslog.1:Apr 19 20:14:09 magui kernel: [    8.510810] ata1: SError: { UnrecovData 10B8B BadCRC }
/var/log/syslog.1:Apr 19 20:14:09 magui kernel: [    8.510914]          res 40/00:08:00:76:14/00:00:00:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
/var/log/syslog.1:Apr 19 20:14:09 magui kernel: [    8.511121]          res 40/00:08:00:76:14/00:00:00:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)

But I have no idea what it means, so I'm kinda lost here. What should I be looking for?

Solution 1

Run smartctl -a /dev/sda or whatever your disk is. Then look at the read error rate and seek error rate lines. If one of theses value is high your disk is probably dead.

Solution 2

Looks like you have a bad disk, controller, or cable. The full kernel log surrounding that would be helpful, rather than only lines that contain the word "error".

Comments

[Runium]

lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/…

[S edwards]

very usefull link on Ask Ubuntu it looks like a major error disk though