HP desktop HDD with Leap 15 somehow came up with a bad sector or surface problem. I could get in ‘sometimes’, but most times the post up just errored out and I had to force shutdown.
Good thing it wasn’t my Win10 HDD (yet anyway), I still had connection(s).
I found an older PATA drive that I could connect via a add in card, and loaded Leap on it.
Now I have to re-learn things all over to get it back to where I was!
So I am looking for another desktop. May need it!
Just one of the challenges with being your own IT support Bill! 
I don’t suppose you want the task, eh?
Fortunately I have backups of critical downloads, and supporting documents. It haven’t been ‘real’ easy, but better than starting all over AGAIN.
We’ll see after the update to the latest kernel tonight if things hold together.
and I did mean the dashed phrasing of the OP.
PATA !
Today, that’s a blast from the past (I have some PATA stuff around in a box somewhere, but it’s mainly for the emergency I hope never happens and hardly anything I now own uses PATA).
Remember, a quick scan by SMART tools might confirm your hardware failure (as though it would make much of a difference if you’re progressively losing data). But, remember also that a drive that isn’t <progressively> losing data isn’t necessrily a disk that needs to be replaced, If failure reads the same over a few weeks, then you may have a disk with bad sectors but can still be used (but keep a close eye on it). I had a Seagate (which generally has the worst reliability reputation of all manufacturers) read the same number of sector failures for over 4 years and never lost any data during that time.
Yes,
If you can fschk your drive, you should probably clone the partitions (or disk) on that failing drive ASAP, don’t use a file-based copy or backup/recovery, that might might send your disk into failure again. It’s a balance knowing you’ll have some corrupted files that may never read or recover vs getting everything else off your disk.
And,
Of course don’t hesitate even a second to get a replacement drive…
A progressively failing drive will just get worse.
Good Luck,
TSU
The PATA drive seems to be working well so far. I was kind of afraid of it being connected via an add in card on a SATA machine, but it is as fast as the SATA drive that failed.
I never got the chance to use Linux tools to do drive checks.
I was getting a bunch of ‘ata’ bad sector notices, and the fsck would never finish. Then some red fails and YELLOW ‘offends’ in the post, so I figured there was a serious problem.)
One time the BIOS informed me that there was a disk problem, so I went in and did the HP DiskSelfTest on the Linux drive and it failed the first pass.
So I tried with ‘SeaTools’ in Windows that is on a separate HDD, and the Linux drive never got past the first test.
Time to start thinking bad words and evil thoughts.
So I had the PATA drive, the addin card and went for it.
As I said, time will tell if it was the right thing to do.
Plus it is a learning experience setting up again and getting back to where I was. (Almost there;))
Wouldn’t that be nice of him, eh? lol!
and I did mean the dashed phrasing of the OP.
Yep, I knew that, and understood why, and agreed…
but, still had to fix it.
How do, Tsu.
If you are interested, I have some 100-Meg & up RLLs from the late 1980s …
On Mon 12 Nov 2018 04:16:02 PM CST, tsu2 wrote:
PATA !
Today, that’s a blast from the past (I have some PATA stuff around in a
box somewhere, but it’s mainly for the emergency I hope never happens
and hardly anything I now own uses PATA).
<snip>
Hi
My SunBlade 150 has PATA… but I got a couple of cheap Reversible
PATA<>SATA converters that just plug in and run a couple of SATA WD
Raptor 10K 36GB drives…
So now you know of at least two people
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SLES 15 | GNOME Shell 3.26.2 | 4.12.14-25.25-default
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Great door stops. 
(I recall the effort we used to go to with identifying and mapping all the bad sectors before deployment - even from new!)
Thanks you, preparing for nightmares instead of sleep now 
You have nothing to worry about - you’ve got backup s of every thing…and so have your customers…pleasant dreams