Question: Today I was working when all of a sudden a power loss (in the entire house) occurs.
I tried to reboot the machine but it states that there’s an “Ebios error”; tried with an Ubuntu 9.04 live cd and while booting it states that there are various I/O errors on the first partition (the one with the boot sector).
Now I managed to backup all of my data (using the live cd aforementioned) but I don’t know if it’ll worth the hassle of a reinstallation (and if it could do something useful) or if the only thing to do is to drop the hard disk as far as possible…
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: It was a very fast shutdown, but the power came back after 5 minutes or so (so very gently)…but the disk is definitely damaged!
Answer: Power loss CAN damage a harddisk, but it would be unlikely, yet if you feel uncomfortable or just want to be a 100% sure, consider buying yourself a fine brand new hard drive… The fact that your harddrive is giving you I/O messages isn’t a good sign anyway…