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Situation: Hard drive failed to boot could not be fixed with my level of knowledge

Action I took : Bought new Hard drive and loaded Ubuntu 14.04 (had a copy handy) on it. I then used "Nautilus" command to access information on the original disk and copy all the files I wanted onto new Hard drive.

Question: Is it safe to reformat the original broken hard drive and use it as a storage drive for my movies? It appeared to be working fine other than the boot sector?

Thanks!

Bryan.

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  • Welcome to ask Ubuntu! ;-) It depends... Without further information, this is a hardware question and off-topic here. So please hook up the HDD as an external drive and type: type: sudo apt-get install smartmontools && smartctl --scan, edit your question and post the output.
    – Fabby
    Jun 15, 2015 at 20:21

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It is possible to do that. HOWEVER: If the drive is actually failing, then you will eventually lose everything you put on it. If it's just the boot sector that is bad, then it should work fine. Use 'Disks' inside Ubuntu to format it with an EXT4 filesystem (or something else if you like) and it will show up just like a thumb drive. You can also use this drive for backups.

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  • Also you can enable SMART in "Disks" and monitor disk performance and bad sectors periodically, which will give you rough idea of how long the disk will run. Jun 15, 2015 at 16:54
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    @Daniel, sorry, cannot agree with you on "You can also use this drive for backups." A drive that has been known to fail may fail once again, so not a good choice for backups. For testing, why not.
    – ALAN WARD
    Jun 15, 2015 at 17:25
  • He can use it for backups for as long as it lasts though. I would trust a drive with my backups BEFORE I trusted it with a primary copy of my data.
    – Daniel
    Jun 15, 2015 at 20:08

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