My computer is lagging and giving an I/O error

Question

So, heres the deal, I got my CPU from a friend who works in robotics April 14th 2013, and now February 20th 2014, less than a year later, it has ceased to cooperate. I was playing Minecraft this morning but I had to go to the grocers so I logged off (left the launcher open) and put the CPU to sleep. All was well, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. I came back and the CPU had shut itself down. The battery wasn't dead, I had left it plugged in, but all the lights were off.

In total it takes about an hour to go from shut down, to get to my desktop, where as this morning it took about 30 seconds. The first thing it does is go to the terminal, and it stays and blinks for a minute, but then it gives me this insane sequence:

ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x7 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
ata1.00: irq-stat 0x40000008
ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
ata1.00: cmd 60/08:08:50:ad:ef/00:00:2b:00:00/40 tag 2 ncq 4096 in res 51/40:08:50:ad:ef/00:00:2b:00:00 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F>
ata1.00: status: {DRDY ERR}
ata1.00: error: {UNC}
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 737127760

Sooo, some of the numbers in the middle part aren't right because they were constantly changing. After it repeats this message about 100 times it goes completely black for quite some time then lets me log in, goes black for a while more, lets me click one thing, and then freezes up. Yhis is as far as I've gotten with it, and we're no longer on speaking terms. I would like (if possible) to keep the data on this, but if it must go then indeed it must.

Answer 1

This part:

end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 737127760

Looks like a failing hardrive. It's a physical problem, and probably your hardrive is about to die. I would make a backup of all important data you may have on the computer before it stops working completely, and replace it.

Answer 2

It may be a hard drive issue, you just need to make a copy of what you need, backed up and run systems diagnostics on it.

I had this error with a redhat install and it actually turned out to be a bad cable and not the drive itself.