http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

I have a Dell inspiron 1525 laptop.
Bought it new from Dell in August 2008.
A few months later I was starting to get issues with freezing, eventually I got tired of it when it would have problems rebooting after freezing.
Just before the 5 month mark I called Dell, they ended up sending me a new hard drive. Put that in and then a few weeks later, same thing, this time I made Dell take it in for repair.
They put another new hard drive in it and sent it back.
Things were “ok” (still occasional freezing) for awhile.
Now, about 4 months after the last new hard drive was put in, its kicked the bucket again.
Everything froze up, I tried restarting, got error messages and freezing, shut it down and then restarted, same thing, did a disk check, let it run overnight since it was SUPER slow. By morning the computer was back on the windows desktop. I figured I’d restart it, and thats when it all went bad fast!
Now it won’t start up. It attempts to and after a while of loading up a blue screen flashes and it restarts itself, and this loop continues.
Currently, I have pressed F12 at start up and am running diagnostics and have gotten an error:
Error code: 0142 Msg: Error-code 2000-0142 Msg: Hard drive 1 – self test unsuccessful Status: 70

So thats where I’m at, its still running the rest of the diagnostics but I’m fearing the worse.
I’m hoping to find a way to get my files off it before I try sending it back to Dell or whatever they want to do.

What I’m wondering is:
If this has happened to 3 hard drives now, and the computer is only 9 months old, what could be causing this?
It must be something else in the computer rather than me being unfortunate enough to get 3 defective hard drives…..
I just want to have some sort of plan when I call Dell again, I need to know what to tell them to replace this time rather than them just sending me a new hard drive over and over again!

Thanks!

Dell Studio XPS
Core I7 (Quadcore at about… 2.7 or whatever it is)
12 Gigabytes DDR3 Ram
1 Terrabyte internal hard drive

The computer is from December 08… After one month of using the computer, the original hard drive (a few hundred gigabytes) failed. That was annoying, but its been replaced with the current 1 T hard drive… well before the old hard drive failed, I had noticed on one of my high games, x3 Terran Conflict, that the hard drive would end up exiting to desktop or crashing from time to time…. on the new hard drive, the same game has only lately developed a tendancy to show strange colors in the background until refreshed by leaving an area and coming back, and whats more today it simply shut off… I was able to turn it back on, and it didn’t seem to be particularly slow, but perhaps slightly slower (I know you guys have talked about that at length as an issue). This COULD be nothing, but I’m very paranoid after that last incident as I don’t want to replace the hard drive every few months… could this be coincidence or should I be concerned?

I should note that on the last hard drive, when we took it apart, the plate had actually been physically damaged by the read/write head…(seriously scratched up) is that repeatable or just a manufacturing defect??

Your problem is not a hardware fail. This is either a software problem or the beginnings of a harddrive fail.

One of the warning signs or an imminent fail is slow operation and odd noises from the drive. Given your system specs and the size and model of your HDD, this computer and HDD would be about 5 years old. This is a pretty good run for a hard drive, and will likely die within the next year or so.

Firstly, you need to do backup all of your important files. Then try re-installing your browser and running a virus scan. (Malwarebytes is a good first up free check – http://download.cnet.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html?part=dl-10804572&subj=dl&tag=button).

I suggest you look at a new system, as an upgrade every 5 years is pretty common.

And good luck!