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.
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.