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  • Laptop: Dell Latitude E6410
  • HDD: WD1200BEVS – 22LAT0, not the original, taken from another laptop which reached its end of life but the HDD worked there until the end.

I tried it twice. The HDD is detected successfully. I selected managed partitioning, one partition for everything and confirmed the proposed ext4 119 GB, swap 1 GB. After a while the following message appeared (translated from German, so may not be the real English one):

Creating the file system ext4 of partition 1 on SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) failed.

After a break I started a new installation with manual partitioning rather than managed (once with the same settings as mentioned above, once with ext4 118 GB, swap 1 GB ... who knows ... 2n disk size calculation etc.) and there I got:

Input/output error during read on /dev/sda

ERROR!!!

(Really? Three exclamation marks?)

... and after Cancel:

Error fsyncing/closing /dev/sda: Input/output error

Warning!

... and after Retry:

Creating the Swap space failed

The Swap space in partition 2 on SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) could not be created.

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  • And what does syslog/journalctl say? Commented Jul 12 at 21:23
  • @BobGoddard There's no journalctl in the ash supplied by this Live USB. In syslog there are lines like "sda: unable to read partition table" and "Buffer I/O error on dev sda, ..., async page read" but these say nothing to me about the real cause. Commented Jul 12 at 22:34
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    @GeroldBroser Did you already verify the health of the storage device that's throwing that error/warning message? Commented Jul 12 at 22:55
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    How to check the health of a hard drive Commented Jul 12 at 22:58
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    @JorgeLuiz Many thanks! That helped! See my answer herein. Commented Jul 12 at 23:43

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I took another approach and connected the HDD to my main laptop to try to partition and format it there. Immediately after connecting I got a system notification like "device /dev/sdc is likely to fail soon".

I considered the suggestion made by Jorge Luiz in a comment to the question:

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdc

... and got right at the top:

...

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
...

Seems that the HDD has reached its end of life, too.

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