Hi guys one of my friends was trying to put Linux on his laptop but it was doing some very undetermined behavior. I was wondering if there was any software out there I could use to test the hardrive?
Can you provide more details? What is it doing? Will it Boot? Post? Do you need software for windows or linux?
Most of the time It will have a kernal panick and other times It will make it to the splash screen. Sometimes we can boot it from the flash drive but somtimes it can install without error but when it does we end up where we started, unable to boot from the hardrive after rebooting the system. We tried Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
So it sounds like you can get the live usb drive to boot okay, but things only go wrong after install. Is that right?
You're linux live cd/usb probably has GNOME Disk Utility (Might just be called "Disk Utility" or something similar) built in.
That should allow you to check for S.M.A.R.T. errors and run some diagnostics.
when booting into the stick in grub it gave the option to check the medium, once I did this it also gave a kernal panick.
There are a couple versions of CrystalDiskInfo. I would recommend the latest standard portable edition. Just run the program and it will pretty much instantaneously show you the health of the drive. It uses a traffic-light colour code system of green, amber, and red. If it is anything except green, there is an issue with the drive. Note: Just because it states that the drive is good, it does not necessarily mean that it is; however if it states that the drive is bad, you can best bet that it is.
Doesn't sound like the hard drive then. Checking the medium means checking the usb drive for errors. It shouldn't be touching the hard drive at that point. Does windows still work?
Maybe try a different usb? If it's a newer laptop you might have better luck changing the UEFI to legacy/BIOS boot mode.
we tried legacy mode and different flash drives.
we also turned off secure boot.
Have you tried running memtest?
what is that?
It's a RAM diagnostic test. It's often listed in GRUB on the live USB. Some motherboards have it built in too.
I will check that out as well.
Test the RAM and Hard drive
Memtest86+
Crystal Disk Info
pass acpi=off to the kernel and that should fix the issue
and post the kernel panic please
It it appears there is not a hardware issue.