Comment 139 for bug 438136

I am also facing the issue. I had an old SATA hard disk and once I upgraded to Karmic it started giving me hard disk failure errors. I tried to ignore them for a while, but slowly things deteriorated and soon half of my hard disk was rendered useless, even if I tried to format that partition Ubuntu would crash and drives would become read-only and I couldn't save / edit anything on the hard disk.
At times when rebooting it would say that no bootable media was found and that it was unable to mount the hard disk. I would restart go to GRUB and select another image to boot from and it would boot fine.

In anyways considering the kind of those errors I assumed that something is indeed wrong with the hard disk. I went ahead and purchased a brand new hard disk. (Toshiba), and installed karmic from scratch and installed all my softwares and utilities that I needed for my development setup all over again, took me almost a week. But good thing was that the errors disappeared!

One month into that, and the errors have now reappeared. Ubuntu shows me again that there are bad sectors and slowly but steadily they are increasing! Ubuntu would hang suddenly at times and I would have to reboot, go to the recovery console, it would be unable to mount my hard disk and I would have to do a FSCK to repair some inodes and when I then reboot and come back, I am able to boot normally but only to see that the number of bad sector count has increased.

I have a terrible feeling that Ubuntu is somehow corrupting my hard disk, I have no reason to believe that my 1 month old brand new hard disk could have any problems whatsoever.

This is really pathetic! I have been an Ubuntu fan for over 4 years now and have never looked back to windows. But this whole incident has left me haunted. I can't afford to buy new hard disks every couple of months. This is just not acceptable! Someone please do something. I beg you!