After a failed attempt to install KDE Neon on an old laptop (interrupted install by unintentional power down), I find that the laptop will no longer boot. Prior to the attempted install KDE Neon was already present, but I wanted to reinstall because of a problematic automatic update. I formatted the intended install disk with GParted, so there is no worry about the old OS install still being there or saving any data on this disk.
When I say it won’t boot, obviously I mean from the hard disk, but it also now doesn’t boot from any live USB stick I try. The only thing I have that does boot (after an hour or so of waiting) is a boot-repair-disk that I can run in the CD/DVD drive. From here and running the following terminal command
sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null count=1
I get the following output:
dd: error reading '/dev/sda'; Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes copied. 334.809 s. 0.0 kB/s
As I understand it, this is telling me that the disk is broken. If so, is it fixable and how would I go about fixing it, or is it now necessary to physically replace the disk?
Edit in response to comments
Following sbecker’s suggestion, I physically removed the drive from the laptop and I can now boot via Live CD. Fortunately the laptop has two hard drives, the problematic one that’s been removed, and an even larger one that I’ve been using as a back-up drive. I am now in a position to copy what I need from the back-up drive, and then when that’s done, install my OS onto the remaining hard drive, and then possibly at some time in the future get a new drive to slot in place of the removed one.
