I needed GPartEd to format a MicroSD card (don't trust Disk Utility too much as more problems seem to occur with hard drives and memory cards I formatted with it, than with the ones I formatted wth GPartEd), and almost got a heart attack... There's a damaged partition on my new hard drive (a bit more than 2 months old)!
Luckily it was only my SWAP partition, but still...
I'd like to know a few things...
- How to rule out the possibility of hardware failure.
- How this can happen if the problem's not hardware-related.
- I only installed Linux once on this computer (waited for Ubuntu 12.04 to get released), so it's not a SWAP partition that remains from an earlier installation.
- What can be the cause of physical hard drive damage.
- The computer hasn't fallen of a desk or anything...
- How to prevent this in future, if at all possible.
- Additional: Whether it's normal that reading (and writing as well, I think) speed drops significantly over a minute time; and if it's not, what are some possible ways to analyse/fix the issue?
No problem if you can't answer all of my questions.
Information
It's a read-only benchmark.
The partition labeled Windows holds a Windows 7 installation I'm supposed to need some time for school, and I used before Ubuntu 12.04 got released. I have booted it up a few times after Ubuntu 12.04 was installed (I don't know whether Windows' disk check can do any harm to Linux partitions, but it always seems to run a checkdisk after I changed my partition table layout with a Linux application like GPartEd)./dev/sda7
is the SWAP partition I'm talking about.
I guess my best option now is just try to boot a Live CD and format /dev/sda7
again? It won't format it from my installed Ubuntu system.