My Zorin 11 Core 32bit has crashed & died !

Not even a month after the install! Actually, it may well be the HD....

All was fine last night, had a couple of updates, then I restarted the computer and all still seemed fine. This morning I pulled up Firefox and it took longer than usual. I clicked a link and the fan started running a bit. It finally landed on the intended website. I decided to restart to maybe help. On bootup I got a BusyBox message that said to enter "help" for commands. I did, it really didn't make much sense to me, so i did another reboot, this time getting a blue and white Zorin screen with what looked like kernel versions. I clicked the top one and got a message about "wrong magic number". I rebooted again and got another blue and white Zorine screen with just Zorin and run memtest on it. I clicked Zorin and got a much longer verbose message. This included the errors:

failed command: READ DMA EXT
error { AMNF }
blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 306625082
Buffer I/O error on dev sda, logical block 38327879, async page read
Error reading block 38327879 (Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read)
/dev/sda1: UNEXPECTED CONSISTENCY: RUN fsck MANUALLY. fsck exited with status code 4.

I took a moment to check out more about "fsck" online, then entered: fsck /dev/sda1

The following is what I have now on my screen:

(initramfs) fsck /dev/sda1
fsck from util-linux 2.26.2
601.100052 ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
601.100065 ata3.00: BMDMA stat 0x64
601.100075 ata3.00: failed command: READ DMA EXT
601.100089 ata3.00: cmd 25/00:08:80:f7:da/00:00:24:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in
res 51/01:00:80:f7:da/01:00:24:00:00/e0 Emask 0x9 (media error)
601.100106 ata3.00: status { DRDY ERR }
601.100114 ata3.00: error: { AMNF }
601.133233 ata3.00: blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 618329984
(after the above line it repeats this same text starting at the "exception" line. After the "blk_update_request" line it reads the following:)
603.093674 Buffer I/O error on dev sda1, logical block 77290992, async page read
fsck: error 2 (No such file or directory) while executing fsck.ext2 for /dev/sda1

At this point all I know to do is boot my Puppy disc and hope i can get to my drive to backup my home folders

If anyone has any ideas, well, I should would love the company on this. In the meantime, I'll try to figure it a little further.

Possibly a SATA cable issue?:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/133946/a ... -dangerous

or hopefully NOT a failing drive?

I swapped SATA cables shortly after this happened, used a known-good cable on a separate connector. Puppy Linux wouldn't mount it at all, Porteus tried to mount it but spit out a barrage of errors instead. My second drive is working fine.

The drive also starts to spin up but clicks and spins back down, repeatedly. Doesn't sound good.

This is a WD Caviar 320GB drive dated September 2007, and has seen much thrashing under the burden of Vista. On the bright side, since I had just installed Zorin less than a month ago I still have my Vista backup, so I might have lost only a few things. I spotted a 1TB SATA drive for $29 over at PCPartsOhio, or a 2TB for $35. Will order this week.

Yes loud clicking noises sounds like a failing hard drive - worse when clicks become clunks!