Hi Christina... I'm still following along, but you're getting such good advice from
@arochester and
@wizardfromoz and
@Ptahhotep that I have just been attending to other things. Wizard may be heading toward my next thought (he does seem to be a mind reader sometimes)... but I'd like for you to also use another tool to do some testing on your hard drive. Using different tools can give different perspectives on what may be going on. The one I have in mind is something I mentioned earlier, called
smartmontools. It also has a graphical interface available (
GSmartControl) to make it a little easier to use, I hope! It depends on you having a S.M.A.R.T. capable drive, but it is likely that you do.
Please installed the two programs with just this single command:
Code:
sudo apt install smartmontools && sudo apt install gsmartcontrol
When finished, go into your Ubuntu Dash to access your programs and find/launch GSmartControl. It will need your password to launch this app. It will look like this after you click your hard drive to highlight it, and also click the little arrow icon next to
More:
View attachment 3230
There are a number of things about your hard drive that this can probably detect, but for now I mostly would just like to see if it reports PASSED for the Basic Health Check like mine shows above. The app also has a "short test" and a "long test" that we might ask you to run later.
Another question I have is... Have you tried to boot on your Ubuntu 16.04 USB yet? I guess that you will want to try to reinstall that at some point coming up, and I want to make sure that it works, for one thing. But for another thing... I wonder if when that time comes if we might have you boot on it and use the "live USB" to erase this hard drive and run some of these tests again on the empty hard drive before installing Ubuntu. And then possibly run the tests again after Ubuntu is installed. Testing in stages like that may also help shape our opinion of the health of the drive.
Cheers