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I'm trying to install Ubuntu 12.04 to my brand new eBay purchased hard drive. I only got the drive today and already it's causing me problems. The seller is a proper professional company with 99.9% positive feedback, so it seems unlikely they would have sold me something rubbish.

My old hard drive packed up last Tuesday and so I bought a new one to replace it. Because this was an entirely new drive I decided to install Ubuntu as there was no currently installed operating system.

My computer is an eMachines EM250 netbook. There's no disk drive so I am installing Ubuntu from a USB stick.

The new operating system loads beautifully, and the desktop appears just as it should. When I click install I am taken to the installer which copies the files to about 35% and then displays this:

[Errno 5] Input/output error

This is often due to a faulty CD/DVD disk or drive, or a faulty hard disk. It may help to clean the CD/DVD, to burn the CD/DVD at a lower speed, to clean the CD/DVD drive lens (cleaning kits are often available from electronics suppliers), to check whether the hard disk is old and in need of replacement, or to move the system to a cooler environment.

The hard drive can be heard constantly crackling.

When I booted Ubuntu 12.04 from my old faulty hard drive as a test I didn't even make it past the purple Ubuntu screen, so it can't be that bad.

karel
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Rob Barker
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2 Answers2

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What fixed this for me was to boot up a live cd of gparted and then delete all the partitions on the drive (and apply).

Restarted and booted up into the install again and it worked as expected.

There's some kind of incompatibility with existing partitions. I'm not sure exactly what it is, obviously, but wiping the drive clean of partitions should do the trick.

I ran into this many times and reproduced this cause/fix several times to make sure I wasn't going crazy.

Kevin
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The 'constant crackling' thing might mean that either the drive is faulty or it's getting less power. Visit the HDD company service centre and get it replaced. Try again.

TomKat
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