Confused whether drive is bad or good 1

[mkaladar]

i recently bought a used laptop which worked fine for a week and then troubles. first windows showed disk write error and when i try to restart, it wouldnt . says operating system not found, then sometimes said ntkernel.exe was corrupt and then suddenly it would boot fine and work for like 3/4 hours.

this keeps on repeating again and again. I ran scandisk and NDD surface tests to check for bad sectors and it showed some 8000 bytes are bad. i reformatted the hard drive and ran NDD surface test for a whole night, but it wouldnt show any errors. reinstalled windows and the same happened again.

is the hard drive crapped up or am i missing something., never saw this happen to any desktop drive before. been in this business for 4 years or so.

 

[1stITMAN]

Have you ran hard rive diagnostics yet.

Zaheer Ahmed Iqbal
I.T Systems Support Engineer
Bsc. (Hons).

 

[Freestone]

This could be an indication of faulty memory rather than a hard drive failure.

Both of these memory testers will create bootable diskettes that automatically start their respective memory tests upon boot:

http://www.memtest86.com

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

 

[mkaladar]

good idea

i will try this ASAP and post a reply to you.

thanks

 

[SkipCox]

I agree with Freestone. I just went through the same thing woth an Me install that had given no trouble for 2 years. Disk write errors, more BSOD in an hour than I've seen in 2 years, and lockups with no rhyme or reason.

Turned out to be a crappy 256Mb SDRAM chip. Don't feel bad when you fight something like this for days on end; it's not easy to diagnose.

Skip

http://scc.i8.com

 

[micker377]

Hard drive good - read/write bad, check cables to drive. I've seen this happen on desktops when customer had power cable connected to cheap CPU fan Y - connector. Can you remove and reinsert the hard drive?

 

[mkaladar]

yes, finally caught the culprit. it is the cable connector to the hard drive. i removed and installed the hard drive a few times and this caused some loose contact / bad contact.

now i wonder where to look for this laptop parts. i think its going to be really tough.

whenever the system crashes and rebooting doesnt help , i just push the hard drive connector inside a bit and then its good for another day.

thanks micker

 

[Wannabetechie]

I seem to have the same problem. My laptop keeps working, not working, working, and finally operating system not found. It sometimes recongizes the hard drive in BIOS, and sometimes doesn't. Are these your symptoms also? If so, what did you end up doing?

Thanks
Dennis

 

[SkipCox]

A fair source of laptop parts can be found on ebay by looking for parts only machines. Make sure you get the same exact model that you're working on. Used and refurb dealers often have dead machines they use for parts too. Broken or bad displays are common problems and so damn expensive to replace that many just put the carcass up for auction to get a few bucks back.

Good luck,

Skip

http://home.comcast.net/~skip9/index.html

http://scc.i8.com

 

[mkaladar]

nothing till now. it happens once or twice in a day. i had left the laptop open till today. so whenever this happens, i just partly open the laptop, give the hard drive connector a small push and then its good till i move/carry the laptop again to another place. i am pretty sure its the hard drive cable now. check

http://www.sparepartswarehouse.com

http://www.impactcomputers.com

for the parts.