hard drive troubles...what can I do?

serpentracer

In Runtime
Messages
214
hey guys I was hoping someone may have experienced this before and hopfully there might be a fix for this.
I have a HP touchsmart computer with a samsung hard drive. the hard drives seems to stop working after a little bit of use.
the light for the HD starts to dimly flicker and the computer freezes up. you can't click on anything. and it stays like that until you forcefully power it down by holding the power button.

the weird part is, the bios has the SMART detection stuff. but it's not reporting any trouble until you run the quick tests. then it fails 7% of the way into the test. but it cuts off the words so I can't see the full description of the failure.
HP also has diagnostic tools that runs in windows but the drive stops working before the tests get that far.

I've also come across a compaq laptop doing the same thing.

so what do you guys think? is it fixable? the warranty on the HP is over too. I don't mind putting a new HD in it, I don't want to have to pay for a new windows disk.
 
I have run into this before and there's no real "Fix" for it, the HD is dying. The mechanical parts are failing or it's burning up. I read on these forums that freezing the harddrive may make it work long enough to obtain a bit of data off of it, but if it's mechanical that may not work so well. If there's pertinent data on the drive you can actually pay to have the platters removed and the data read off the drives and backed up on optical disks for you but that costs a kings ransom.
Time to replace the drive :(.

As for the Windows disk, you don't necessarily have to pay for a new OS disk. Your computer came with a valid license key for XP/Vista, so you could legally borrow an install disk as long as you use the key found on the bottom of the laptop and register/activate with MS.
 
Back
Top Bottom