[ale] Possibly bad hard drive

[Jonathan Meek]

Hey guys,

I believe my hard drive is about to give up the ghost hard. Saturday the
system booted without issue then Monday, I booted the system and tried to
start Firefox. The taskbar freaked out and I had to do a hard shutdown.
After multiple restarts I was able to get the system back up but at all the
restarts, I got a error message that stated that it couldn't find a
particular directory and to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart the system.

Finally I got the system to give the prompt for entering in my harddrive
password (I have an encrypted hard disk that I setup when I did a fresh
install of lubuntu last time). It checked for errors and found some, it
tried to repair them and hung at mounting /tmp.

I restarted the system and this time it rebooted without issue I got all
the way to the home screen and logged in. Launched Firefox without issue
and goofed around for a few minutes while I let my backup system backup for
the final time (in fear of never getting it back).

Shutdown the system and restarted it with a Ubuntu 12.04 live CD in order
to do check the hard drive. Went into Disk Utility and the system
recognized I had a hard drive but when I tried any of the benchmarks it
balked at me saying it couldn't read as well as the SMART Status said "not
applicable". This might be from the encryption but I don't know.

Exited out of the live CD, boot the system again, and it booted without
incident. Tried to do software update, it griped at me saying that there
was not enough room in /boot to do an update and to use sudo apt-get clean.
Run sudo apt-get clean and tried the update again. Same error message.
Repeated this step 5 times before giving up.

I am not sure what to do at this stage with it because I can't seem to wipe
the drive probably due to the encryption because I tried to install Ubuntu
12.04 since I had a backup of all my data.

All that backstory was to ask this one question: Is there anything else I
can do to give some level of assurance the actual status of the hard drive?
I think it is busted but I am not sure.

Regards,

Jonathan
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