ice
Sleep Less, Game More
join:2002-07-01
Wind Gap, PA
| [hard drive] Laptop HDD dead?
My Aunt told me that she messed her laptop up and wanted me to look at it. She said it was going through three updates and once it got to the third one it sat there for hours, and she had to go to work and shut it down while it was in progress.
She went to turn it back on and it would get to the BIOS screen and do nothing. When I got a hold of it I tried putting the Vista disc in and booting off that, which eventually works, but once I go to the "repair installation" it can't find any OSes on the drive. I try to repair anyway and I get an error log saying "NoHarddrive". It tells me to load the setup information for the hardware and I try to open every setup information file in the CD and none will work.
Tried a system restore through the command prompt and it said there was nothing to be found.
If I do let it sit at the Gateway screen and see what it does, after about 3 minutes it goes to a screen that says "Operating system not found". On top of all this, the whole time it is attempting to load there is a faint sound like the HDD is trying to spin up and not getting anywhere.
It sounds like a dead harddrive to me, what do you think? I'll post pictures that I think are relevant.
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| 3500+ Winchester (2.2GHZ) | MSI Neo2 Platinum | 80GB HDD | X800 XT PE || 1GB of Gskill 2-2-2-5 | Enermax Noisetaker 420w | Logitech Z-560s | Audigy 2 ZS | | Windows XP | Cable Internet at 9mb/s | |
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Mchart
Super Joe
join:2004-01-21
Gurnee, IL
 ·AT&T Yahoo
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| Yes, the drive is dead. What you are hearing is the drive trying to spin up to the proper speed - but failing. When the motor can't live up to the expectations anymore on a drive this is typically what happens.
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"You figured it out. All new CPU's are nothing but overclocked Pentium 1's with a few bells and whistles added, ask any ol timer whose been around." |
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ice
Sleep Less, Game More
join:2002-07-01
Wind Gap, PA | Just what I thought. I pretty much confirmed it when I booted Linux off my flash drive. |
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yuutomo
The Wonder Kitter
Premium
join:2001-08-27
Missoula, MT | reply to ice
could be a power issue, and the drive is not getting enough power, seen them send bios updates and if aborted the motherboard does odd things afterwards until the BIOS is reflashed. |
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ice
Sleep Less, Game More
join:2002-07-01
Wind Gap, PA | Would MS send a BIOS update though? I don't recall ever seeing one. These were just usual Windows Vista updates that she aborted. |
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yuutomo
The Wonder Kitter
Premium
join:2001-08-27
Missoula, MT | reply to ice
how sure are you that it was MS and not a gateway update, and MS has been known to send out driver updates for hardware that can mess a system up. |
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ice
Sleep Less, Game More
join:2002-07-01
Wind Gap, PA | She said it just started updating on its on so I assumed it was MS since those usually are set to download and install automatically. |
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ice
Sleep Less, Game More
join:2002-07-01
Wind Gap, PA | I'm going to try booting XP off my flash drive just to see if I can even see the HDD under explorer. |
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yuutomo
The Wonder Kitter
Premium
join:2001-08-27
Missoula, MT | reply to ice
I'd get out a multimeter, test the AC adapter, then I'd pull the HDD and see what manufacturer it is, and then get a boot cd of their utilities and test the drive with that. |
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ice
Sleep Less, Game More
join:2002-07-01
Wind Gap, PA | She has an extended warranty from Best Buy so doing that would probably void it, though I don't have the fine print here so I don't know. I was just going to tell her to take it to them and they should give her a new drive. |
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yuutomo
The Wonder Kitter
Premium
join:2001-08-27
Missoula, MT | reply to ice
actually, the extended only kicks in after Gateway's warranty runs out. she'll need to contact Gateway so she can send the laptop back. if it was Dell, they could send a tech onsite. |
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ice
Sleep Less, Game More
join:2002-07-01
Wind Gap, PA | I don't even know how long Gateway's warranty is, she got this about a year ago, maybe more. |
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ice
Sleep Less, Game More
join:2002-07-01
Wind Gap, PA
1 edit | Not to bring this back from the dead, but my Aunt just called me from Best Buy and let me talk to the guy down there, and he said the hard drive passed their "rigorous read and write testing" and that the OS just needs to be reinstalled. I told him that the OS nor the drive itself was even being detected when I put the recovery disc in and he just said it passed their tests fine and that they should bring the disc in for them to try.
I found some SATA drivers on Gateway's site and I'm trying to load them, and while they actually show up in the list of drivers to install, installing them does nothing.
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Intel X3350 Quad@3.2GHZ
Abit IP35 Pro
4096MB of Gskill
320GB+500GB SATA
nVidia 8800GTS 512MB OC |
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