Laptop about to croak?

[ChristopherP]

Hi All,

My Dell Inspiron laptop seems to be having a few difficulties.

For a while when booting into windows it takes ages for the icons to show on the desktop. Then yesterday it was crashing while running windows update. When I rebooted it, it went into a Dell diagnostics utility that I have never seen before! It ran all kinds of tests and threw up couple of errors related to the hard drive - read errors and something else.

Is it likely that my Hard Drive is failing? If so, presumably it's easy enough to whip out the old and whack a new one in there? I don't know if it's IDE or SATA or whether it's 5400 or 7200 RPM. It's out of warranty - bought it in July 2006 so I don't mind opening it up.

If I replace the drive, I'll need to find a copy of XP Media Centre Edition - Dell didn't send me an OS CD. I have my own license code , obviously.

Hm!

 

[Ian]

First of all, back up everything! If there's a chance it could fail at any moment, you want to make sure you don't lose anything. If you are getting read/write errors then it could be an indication that it is failing, can you remember what it said? Some HD errors aren't too serious, but if you are getting bad sectors or you failed the short/long HD test after a repair then I would get a new one.

Your laptop may be out of warranty, but there's a small change the drive might be under warranty still You'd need to pop it out and enter the serial number in to the drive manufacturers website to see if it is still covered (most OEM drives are 1 year, but I found out mine was 3 just a few weeks back).

It should be easy enough to open your laptop up to see what type of drive you have for a replacement, but if you don't want to you can use something like Everest or Belarc to get all the details via software.

 

[Abarbarian]

Not had a lot of experience with laptops but it should only be a couple of screws to pull out the HDD. As usual all the info about the drive will be written on it. You could pull the drive and test it hooked up to a pc or run some diagnostic tests while it is still in the laptop.

Whatever do a back up now of all your important stuff.

If you need a new drive you could put anything you like on it. Depends what you use the laptop for. I'd put a lightweight Linux on it meself.

 

[ChristopherP]

First of all, back up everything! If there's a chance it could fail at any moment, you want to make sure you don't lose anything. If you are getting read/write errors then it could be an indication that it is failing, can you remember what it said? Some HD errors aren't too serious, but if you are getting bad sectors or you failed the short/long HD test after a repair then I would get a new one.

Your laptop may be out of warranty, but there's a small change the drive might be under warranty still You'd need to pop it out and enter the serial number in to the drive manufacturers website to see if it is still covered (most OEM drives are 1 year, but I found out mine was 3 just a few weeks back).

It should be easy enough to open your laptop up to see what type of drive you have for a replacement, but if you don't want to you can use something like Everest or Belarc to get all the details via software.

Thanks for the reply Ian...

I almost soiled myself when the Dell thing came up - I thought 'Oh god it's failed' and I keep all 20Gb of my photo's on a partition on that drive. Not backed up elsewhere... Every single photo that I've taken since I took delivery of my DSLR! And some uni work...

I booted back into windows and threw EVERYTHING over the network to my desktop - so thats OK now.

Interesting about the warranty - I *Think* it's a Hitachi - of the 100Gb variety. I'll check that out and post back...

Everything in windows seems to be unreliable - Opera keeps crashing, Internet explorer wont open at all, the mouse keeps hanging... The diagnostic said everything but the hard drive was OK.

 

[ChristopherP]

Not had a lot of experience with laptops but it should only be a couple of screws to pull out the HDD. As usual all the info about the drive will be written on it. You could pull the drive and test it hooked up to a pc or run some diagnostic tests while it is still in the laptop.

Whatever do a back up now of all your important stuff.

If you need a new drive you could put anything you like on it. Depends what you use the laptop for. I'd put a lightweight Linux on it meself.

Windows 7 maybe? Whats the trial copy like - does it expire?

My laptop came with XP MCE but says "Vista Compatible" so perhaps it's an option? I'll definately put windows on it, not Linux.

Would it be illegal to download an ISO of MCE but use my own serial number from the sticker underneath?

 

[ChristopherP]

It's running scandisk/checkdisk at the moment or whatever it's called - the pre-windows one.

Its at 47% on test 4 (verifying file data) and threw up:

"windows replaced bad clusters in file 46906 of name \i386\niccon~1.cpl."

 

[Abarbarian]

Almost sure you could download and use your key.

7 apparently is a better version of Vista.

Phew you were lucky with your photos.

 

[ChristopherP]

Downloading Windows 7 trial, and Nero 9 Trial version to burn it.

I'll format then install Windows 7, see how that works, and if it still plays up i'll have to swap the HDD. I might double the RAM while i'm at it, I think it's quite cheap at the moment.

 

[ChristopherP]

Oh,

Hard Drive is:

Fujitsu MHV2100BH 100Gb SATA 5400rpm if my googling was correct.

Entered the Serial number into Fujitsu's website and it doesn't like it ?!

 

[Adywebb]

Certainly looks like the HD has problems - whether chkdisk can repair or not I would make sure you back up everything on a regular basis in case it goes.

So you will need to either purchase a copy of Windows 7 then or put another OS on.

I changed a HD on one of my laptops and it was pretty easy with no problems - just make sure you buy a correct replacement

Windows 7 RC expires on June 1, 2010 - however......... "starting on March 1, 2010, your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Windows will notify you two weeks before the bi-hourly shutdowns start"

 

[ChristopherP]

Everything is now backed up... Just installing Nero to whack Windows 7 on. Should it be easy to get online with WiFi? Are drivers available?

What do you mean by correct replacement - presumably any 2.5" notebook SATA HDD should slot in? Or will it have to be identical to the one I pulled out? Ideally i'd like to upgrade to 7200rpm

Windows 7 is OK on trial for a year, i'll buy a copy when the trial runs out if I like it!

 

[ChristopherP]

...Installing...

Maybe a clean install after the chkdsk repairs will make it buck its ideas up...

 

[Abarbarian]

Fujitsu do a diagnostic and repair utility.

http://www.user-guides.co.uk/Fujitsu/FujitsuCDDownloads.asp

 

[ChristopherP]

Thanks mate - will download it and run it later on. Hope it works with Windows 7...

...Which by the way I am V-E-R-Y impressed with. Runs nicely on my laptop which only has 1Gb RAM. Everything opens near instantly. No slower than XP was.