Fast replacement laptop HDD?

[grego]

I've got a Gateway M320X that is a pretty nice Centrino notebook, but I'm pretty sure I've effed up the HDD big time. Boot up literally takes about 10 minutes now. Right clicking anything induces about 15 seconds of lag. The disk makes much much more noise now. I'm performing a full system restore right now, and it has said 6 minutes left for the last 16 minutes, and it keeps giving me file extraction errors.

Bottom line, I'm pretty sure this HDD is toast. Gateway may send me a replacement. However, I wonder if they will deem that I caused the damage and it is not warrantied damage... long story . I'm not actually sure if it was I... but I have a feeling...

Anyway, if they deny replacement, I'm surely not paying an inflated price for them to send me one. I'd really love a 7200 rpm drive, as I cannot stand the 5400. What a bottleneck... 7200 rpm drives are far and few between though it looks like. I was also considering a 5400 hdd with a 16mb cache, i think it was a hitachi and it looks quite a bit cheaper than the few 7200's I've seen.

Any ideas? I'm only looking for a 40-80gb drive for this... it's my backup/take-to-class pc.

 

[uzi9mm]

try this.......... START>RUN>

CHKDSK /r

It will tell you that it cannot be completed since the volume is being used, hit Y to have it do it at next startup.

This command will scan for bad sectors and try to recover any data on those bad sectors. I would give it a try before you throw the drive/replace it.

But anyways I would get the 7200rpm drive if you need to get a new one, but a 5400rpm with 16mb cache does not look to bad either.

 

[grego]

Heh, not so sure what would happen if I tried to cancel the restore at the moment. Not sure what will happen if I let it run either... It appears to be skipping a bunch of dll files. WOOT it just went up another percent though . Half an hour to go from 20 to 22%... ugh. Ha... theres that kernel32.dll....

 

[uzi9mm]

Is there anyway you can check your CPU temps? Last time something like that happened to me, the fan failed on the heatsink, and it took 6 hours to do a format on a 10gb drive. It may sound weird but it happened to me.

 

[grego]

I'll have to keep that in mind. I opened up the HSF area though and it looked fine, and I have heard the fan come on. As far as getting temps, not even sure I'll ever boot the OS again, and if I do, MBM better have my mobo supported or I'm pretty much out of luck.

Ugh... looks like I'm going to have to put a weight on the Enter key and hope it doesn't have any foul consequences, lol. Those damn errors come up like every 60 seconds, and at this rate, theres going to be TONS of them, and I need some damn sleep.

Now to rig up that enter key...

 

[grego]

I think I might have to add this to the "Worst tech support" thread... This is literally copy/paste:

Me (email excerpt):
I am currently performing a complete system restore. I am 34 minutes into the restore, and it has said 6 minutes remaining for about 14 minutes. I keep getting errors like this one, with only the file name chaning, "Problem in extracting process: File: WINDOWS\system32\iasrecst.dll"

TECH Response:
Hello Greg,

Thank you for using Gateway's Online E-mail Support. I checked our records and found out that you have purchased an "Always There" system, which means that all of your Applications and Drivers are backed up to the D:\ partition. This means that you do not need Restoration Discs torestore your system, but only needs the backup partition to do the restore process. To promptly resolve the issues with your system such as errors, lock ups and slow performance, I suggest that you run a Full System Restore.


Good idea Ira, I hadn't thought of that!