It’s time to update my desktop at Kubuntu 22.04. To be sure that there will be no problems with devices and the software that I use every day, it’s important to a check new distro before installing it on the internal hard drive. I’d decided to install Kubuntu on an external disk.
First, I’d used one of my USB flash drives. Unfortunately, all of them were extremely slow, that is why I gave up on this idea. Also, I have one relatively old HDD that I used for backups several years ago. Usually, HDD is much faster and reliable than USB flash drives, so it looked like a suitable solution for my task. I’d bought 2.5" HDD enclosure and connected the HDD to my desktop. I tried to install Kubuntu on it, but with no luck: it had shown an I/O error on the FS creation step. An error reproduced on different distros, so it was not a distro-specific.
I thought the HDD was too old and had a lot of bad blocks, so I tried to run badblocks -svn -b 512 -c 65536 /dev/sda to check the device. Unfortunately, it took an hour to check 0.1%, so I’d
canceled the operation. I was ready to give up on the whole idea, but suddenly I tried a different
USB cable, and it worked! Kubuntu had installed with no errors.
The moral: all parts of the chain can be faulty, so check all of them one by one, and it can help you solve the problem.