My laptop’s HDD is failing, it shows a bunch of signs such as slow file manipulation and clicking sounds. The Linux btrfs partition keeps going into read-only mode to prevent further damage, makes sense, but the windows partition is working fine (for now).
Shouldn’t harddrive failure be evident on all partitions?
It depends on the exact nature of the failure. Controller errors are usually a complete failure. Media failure (magnetic spots on the disk or failed cells in ssd) are often sporadic and only impact data stored in those spots.
Regardless, drives rarely give you any warning. Look at any warning as a gift and get everything off and replace it ASAP.
Yup. I would try to stop using it if at all possible. As soon as you can, dump a full disk image to some other storage. Tools like ddrescue can be useful as they will try to re-read failed sectors to get a more complete image.
Once you have the data (or at least as much is available) to a reliable medium then you can start sorting through it and discarding or saving individual bits.
Seconding this. OP, get a new drive, get a live USB with ddrescue on it, and get that transfer started, stat.
its a configuration thing… sounds like maybe linux has detected the SMART errors and acted accordingly on its managed partition. windows is not making the same choice.
With the clicking etc it sounds like a mechanical failure?! A harddrive has several disks "platter"s stacked inside and multiple heads inside. They don’t necessarily all fail at the same time. Also sometimes there are just small areas affected that become inaccessible due to various reasons. They’ll probably grow at some point and you’re bound to loose more data. But if it’s an area of several consequtive blocks, it’ll show when you’re accessing those. And if your partitions and data are arranged serially, the next one might be physically stored where everything is still fine.
