Hard drive failure?

[PJYelton]

My wife was using her new (less than a year old) HP Pavilion zt3000 notebook this morning when it suddenly crashed while she was working on a Word document. Now when she turns on the computer, it goes to the Windows loading screen before it shows a blue screen for a split second and then reboots again. This happens irregardless if we try to load in safe mode, safe mode with command prompt, or any other possible loading options. The blue screen happens so fast, we ended up having to take a picture of it with a camera just so we could read it. It says "A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer. UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME". This is followed up by a list of common remedies none of which we can do since no loadup option works. It then says "Technical Information: STOP" followed by a memory location.

If we go into ROM setup with F10 there is an option to check the hardrive, and when we do we almost instantly get an error saying Hard Drive Write Failure.

I have never had a hard drive problem before with any of my computers, I really don't know what to do at this point. Am I out of luck completely or is there anything else I could try? If not, what do I do now?

 

[southernlady]

Can you take the hard drive out and make it a slave to your computer? And what make is the hard drive? NOT the computer but the hard drive itself? Liz

 

[PJYelton]

I'll try taking the hard drive out and figuring out the make. How would I make it a slave? Sorry, I'm a little new to this.

 

[southernlady]

It depends on the make but somewhere around the top edge will be a diagram showing the positions for the little pegs on the edge where it was plugged in. Let me know what make and I'll hunt up the proper diagram. Liz

 

[PJYelton]

Ok, it'll be about half an hour or so. It turns out we don't have anything small enough to get the tiny screws out, so we have to go out and buy something.

 

[southernlady]

Sorry, but if you want to save this and not have to take it to a professional, we will have to do it this way, Liz

 

[PJYelton]

Ok, we found a straight edge small enough to get the screws out. The hard drive is a Hitachi TravelStar Model #IC25N060ATMR04-0. The diagram on the hard drive is hard to figure, I've drawn a picture of it and included it on the bottom of this post. There are only 4 pins even though it shows 6, and I'm not sure what the jumper position it shows is supposed to do. I found a diagram here to make the drive a slave, i'll try this out and get back to you.

 

[southernlady]

Cable select and slave will work. Good work, Liz

 

[PJYelton]

Ok, this turned out to be a bigger problem than it should have been. I followed the webpage diagram for both cable select and slave, unfortunately the hard drive is such a tight fit that the jumpers are too big, and the hard drive will not go back into its proper place in the laptop Not sure who's brilliant idea that was. I have no idea where to get smaller jumpers, I just took one off an old motherboard I had.

I was able to get cable select in properly, but nothing changed, I still get the same blue screen and reboot. When I have it in slave, I get a "Non-system disk or disk error" which I can't tell if its because theres something wrong with it being slave or if the jumper is preventing the hard drive from being secured properly since I would get that same error if no hard drive was installed.

 

[PJYelton]

Ok, I don't think slave mode is doing anything, I just keep getting Non-System Disk errors. And cable select just gives me the same blue screen error and reboot. Is there anything else I could possibly try? Thanks so much for the help by the way.