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I have an old Lenovo U310 laptop (7-8 years) and for almost a year I've been using it as a dual-bootable system. One OS was Windows 8.1 and the other one was Kali Linux.

I've been using Kali Linux just for messing around, trying to get into Linux, cybersecurity, cryptography, etc... and Windows for watching movies and some basic student work while traveling. I wasn't using it very often, as it isn't my main PC, and because while learning penetration testing many things may go wrong, I had no real data on it (in order to be easy to reset in case something goes wrong).

The performance was pretty good for its age, everything was running pretty smoothly, only under heavy load it got a little bit hot and the fan went crazy (converting a few GB password dicts, cracking hashes, brute-forcing, etc.)

A few days ago it suddenly didn't want to boot. I tried to get into Windows and it wasn't doing anything for approximately 1 hour and then it crashed and threw a blue screen of death.

Then I tried to boot Kali. It took approximately 1 hour and then it finally got to the login screen. Everything felt super sluggish and took unimaginably long to accomplish. Just opening the terminal was like a 2 minute journey. It seemed like it was lagging in some kind of periods - it works for a few seconds, then freezes, works, freezes, ... So I opened system monitor and saw spikes on all 4 cores. In one moment it was around 1 - 15% and a second later on 50 - 60%. The overall graph is just ups and downs.

That said, booting from live Kali Linux performed perfectly well.

Here are some screenshots of a short period of time from system monitor. They are ordered chronologically.

Time 0

Time 1

Time 2

I've tried to reset whole system. It was a bit tricky because I couldn't access the Windows Boot menu, but I managed to format all drives and reinstall a Kali Linux again.

The whole installation took more than 6 hours and as far as I remember, it should be around 30 minutes at worst.The resulting behavior is still the same, slow, unresponsive, lagging and unusable.

I also retrieved this SMART status of HDD. I don't see anything pointing to disk failure, but I'm not very familiar with this area, can anyone confirm?

Any suggestion on next steps or what can be the cause of this sudden change in behavior?

root@kali:~# smartctl -a /dev/sda
smartctl 7.0 2018-12-30 r4883 [x86_64-linux-5.3.0-kali2-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-18, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Blue Mobile
Device Model:     WDC WD5000LPVT-08G33T1
Serial Number:    WD-WX21A82U5391
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 25caa8bf2
Firmware Version: 02.01A02
User Capacity:    500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5400 rpm
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 3.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Sat Apr  3 14:50:24 2021 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status:  (0x00) Offline data collection activity
                    was never started.
                    Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
Self-test execution status:      (   0) The previous self-test routine completed
                    without error or no self-test has ever 
                    been run.
Total time to complete Offline 
data collection:        ( 8760) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities:            (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
                    Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
                    Suspend Offline collection upon new
                    command.
                    Offline surface scan supported.
                    Self-test supported.
                    Conveyance Self-test supported.
                    Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities:            (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
                    power-saving mode.
                    Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability:        (0x01) Error logging supported.
                    General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine 
recommended polling time:    (   2) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time:    (  98) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time:    (   5) minutes.
SCT capabilities:          (0x70b5) SCT Status supported.
                    SCT Feature Control supported.
                    SCT Data Table supported.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       421
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   154   118   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       1275
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   065   065   000    Old_age   Always       -       35659
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002f   171   171   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       8190
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   095   095   000    Old_age   Always       -       4084
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   097   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       3689
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       81
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   167   167   000    Old_age   Always       -       99927
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   107   102   000    Old_age   Always       -       36
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       27
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0032   095   095   000    Old_age   Always       -       3799

SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
No self-tests have been logged.  [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t]

SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
 SPAN  MIN_LBA  MAX_LBA  CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
    1        0        0  Not_testing
    2        0        0  Not_testing
    3        0        0  Not_testing
    4        0        0  Not_testing
    5        0        0  Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
  After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.
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  • 1
    Sounds like your disk is dying. Have a look at its SMART data.
    – harrymc
    Apr 3, 2021 at 16:53
  • 1
    The fact that the live Kali boot was fine but the internal hard drive boot wasn’t points to there being something wrong with the disk. Maybe it’s not explicitly failing, but perhaps the drive is heavily fragmented or there are files that are corrupt. Apr 4, 2021 at 0:04
  • 1
    @Giacomo1968 so should I try to defragment the drive?
    – maklmor
    Apr 4, 2021 at 7:07
  • @maklmor I think that is a decent first step. Apr 4, 2021 at 22:16

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