On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:21 PM, Ralph Katz
<ralph.katz@rcn.com> wrote:
Lenny install on newly acquired used Dell hangs and throws errors to
syslog. Do I have two bad disks or a more serious hardware problem?
Short of buying a new disk, how would I know? What would you recommend?
Or do I have a simple BIOS setting problem?
[snip]
If you boot to an Ubuntu Live CD, it will automatically let you know of any bad hard disk sectors via a pop up GUI upon booting to the desktop environment. I inherited a decommissioned hard drive from a server room and used Ubuntu Live CD to confirm it had bad sectors, hence the reason for its decommissioning.
Once you confirm it's not the hdd, then you can troubleshoot other possibilities.
HTH.
Mark