This error implies that there may be an issue with Xorg or maybe your NVIDIA GPU cannot start or initialize: 35 laptop kernel: [ 2031.857704] nvidia: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel. 35 laptop kernel: [ 2031.857724] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel. 35 laptop kernel: [ 2031.857725] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint 35 laptop kernel: [ 2031.873280] nvidia: module verification failed: signature a........

grub> root (hd0,0) root (hd0,0) Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd grub> setup (hd0) setup (hd0) But if you do: root (hd1,0) setup (hd1) it does work, I think hd0/sda had a GPT partition that was not removed properly (what I did was just dd bs=512 count=1 the partition table from another drive since the partition table should be identical). Checking if "/boot/grub/........

I like badblocks and don't know a better more reliable way of checking the drive. If there are no errors from badblocks and dmesg doesn't produce any SATA related errors, the drive should be good (for now at least). I also prefer to do read and write mode, yes it takes ages but it is really the best way of doing it. This gives me the most confidence in knowing that a drive, especially a new one is at least OK at the moment. To test in read only mode........