@BasileStarynkevitch

Hello Pandya

Yes.

Why do you have so many partitions?

On /dev/sda

How old is your laptop?

Did you run smartctl ?

1 is reserved by Windows boot recovery, 1 for windows 7 system, 1 for GNU/Linux. 4 partitions I am using other then them 3 of them are NTFS and 1 is EXT4. 1 partition is for Linux swap I think.

@BasileStarynkevitch How do I find the manufacturing date?

Why do you need 3 NTFS partitions? Why not just one?

Most laptops have some label underneath, mentioning some "made in china" with a serial number and some year

@BasileStarynkevitch No, I didn't run smartctl

BTW, are you interested in refpersys.org ?

Are you interested in artificial intelligence? If yes, please send me an email to [email protected]

You should run smartctl but carefully

@BasileStarynkevitch why are you asking to contact through mail periodically?

@BasileStarynkevitch well, I don't know the machine learning which is prerequisite for AI I think.

@BasileStarynkevitch I don't know how to run it properly

Because of refpersys.org which needs more volunteers

Run properly what? smartctl has a man page!

free (as in freedom) software! Nice :)

gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

@BasileStarynkevitch I am not a programmer. So, I can't help with coding.

Then why do you have both Linux and Windows on your laptop?

And why do you have so many disk partitions?

If you use your laptop for games, Windows is enough.

@BasileStarynkevitch Yes, I know the philosophy. see an answer

@BasileStarynkevitch I don't play game. I insist on free software.

If you use your laptop for something more interesting (perhaps writing school reports with LaTeX, ...) Linux is enough, but I don't understand why you need so many disk partitions

So, having more disk partitions is the reason why I am facing this problem? @BasileStarynkevitch

I cannot imagine why a non-programmer needs ten partitions on his laptop

I don't know.

@BasileStarynkevitch ok. So, I'll merge two or three partitions :)

But I would imagine that if you have a rotating disk (not an SSD) having a lot of partitions might wear out the hardware more quickly. This is just an intuition

With many partitions your disk head has to move more.

You need to use smartctl with an otherwise inactive laptop.

Since smartctl can run disk tests.

ok. I will read smartctl manual and will run it.

If your disk is broken, change it very quickly, but first try to backup the data you care the most about

Is my HDD dying?

Your HDD could be dying, but I don't have enough information about it.

When my HDD was dying, smartctl detected it

ok. But what about

Is these due to faulty HDD?

Your dmesg output mention a crypted disk partition. Do you have some?

@BasileStarynkevitch should I run sudo smartctl /dev/sda?

Yes, but with additional option, on an otherwise inactive laptop

@BasileStarynkevitch No, I have never manually encrypted any data or drive

Maybe the Debian or Ubuntu installer did that for you

How do I check it?

But I still don't understand why you need ten partitions

You could run df -h and mount as root

Again, why do you need some many partitions?

Why don't you just have a /home/ partition separate of the root partition?

I don't have separate partition for /home, /root; everything is under /

But why do you need a /mnt/Ext4 and a /mnt/Documents. Please explain in written English. No need to paste three times the same output

No, you do have several file systems, as the output of df -h shows. And you don't explain why is it so

ok. I think I should discuss you after merging partition and reducing number of partitions. Thanks for your time :)

I need an explanation in written English. I don't need screenshots

My personal intuition is that your hardware disk drive is dying

but I could be wrong.

@BasileStarynkevitch Yes, it has bad sectors

So replace it as soon as possible. In a few hours, your laptop is dead or could be dead

If your sight is good and if you have a good screwdriver, replacing an internal disk on Dell laptops is doable by yourself

bad sectors are there for more than a year.

If you are scared of doing that alone, go quickly to a shop

So what, it means that your HDD is broken since more than a year.

What is the economical value of the data on your laptop?

How many hours of work do you lose when the HDD is totally broken?

Or is your laptop just a toy to play games?

Why do you own a laptop? What for?

I personally would recommend replacing the HDD with an SSD disk.

SSD disks are becoming cheap (e.g. 50€ in France) and are much more mechanically reliable (less sensitive to tiny mechanical shocks, e.g. when you transport your laptop)

On the other hand, SSD disks are rumored to break entirely at once.

I really would like you to explain in written English why do you own a laptop.

And what happens to you once the laptop does not work at all (because the HDD is completely broken)

My intuition and past but recent (a year ago) experience suggests that your HDD could be completely non-working in a few days or weeks.

Once you've got any bad sectors messages...

Hence the question you still did not answer: what will happen to you once your HDD is not working at all (and then your laptop cannot even boot)

I have to leave. Good bye. Feel free to contact me by email to [email protected]

@BasileStarynkevitch I haven't lost any data. I use my laptop normally. It works fine. As I have said already, I don't play games. I use office-tools, browser, photo editing and everything that one does on unusual usage. The only problem I face (once in a month) is "PC becomes hang or unresponsive when system fails to read/write data on HDD and that time, I need to restart, check system drive and repair boot loader. That's all. And it starts working fine"

You haven't lost any data yet. Wait a little time, and you'll lose some or all of it.

Hence my question: what will happen to you once your HDD is not working at all ? (I would appreciate an answer in written English; if privacy is a concern, contact me by email to [email protected])

My intuition is that in a few weeks, your HDD will be completely broken. I hope for you to be wrong

"it starts working fine" is a probable illusion. You certainly means, "it seems to work fine"

Some level of bad sectors is normal and designed to be handled invisibly these days; actually seeing repeated errors is a clear sign the disk is failing

@MichelHomer: by past experience, when dmesg shows something about bad sectors, the disk is really dying

AFAIU "the normal bad sectors" are not even seen by dmesg, only by smartctl

Yeah, when you're seeing it then things are bad already

Does anyone know how to put a row of stars between different invocations of pdfinfo here?

find . -name '*minute*' -exec pdfinfo  '{}' \; | less

@FaheemMitha As in

find . -name '*minute*' -exec pdfinfo '{}' \; -exec printf '*****\n' \; | less

?

@fra-san Oh, a second command? Ok.

That works. Thanks. But I'm not sure I'm could remember all this.

@FaheemMitha You are not alone, I think I've never successfully used find without resorting to the manual.

@fra-san Right now I just used command recall. But I think I did look at the man page before. Weird syntax.

I don't think I've ever succeeded in using a custom command with find. That \; looks super weird to me, which is probably related

Now that I see that it makes a lot of sense to protect that backslash from bash itself, but I'm pretty sure that's one point that trips me up all the time. I've learned to just resort to -name searches...

or, you know, cargo culting from unix.SE