Dell 600M Notebood and the Blue screen of death (HDD Issue?)

[Jeff Lam]

My wife's dell 600M took a crap last night. The thing froze up nearly completely like it was processing something forever and it was making some funny noises. I finally had to turn it off completely. I tried to reboot but had no luck getting past the Windows XP first screen. I then removed the HD and took a look at the memory and such and tried to boot again.

It worked! I quickly grabbed the jumpdrive to backup all the most recent files since our last backup. I thought maybe it's a Virus so I ran the AVG scan.

Bam... Blue screen of death:

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer. KERNAL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR If this is the first time you've seen this screen...blah...blah...blah

It does this every time shortly after boot up. I have not added any hardware or software recently.

I was thinking it may be a Hard Drive failure especially due to the noises but the notebook is only slightly over 2 years old. It has a 30GB Toshiba drive in it and I just wanted to check here to see what everyone thought.

I also wanted opinions on which HDD would be a good fit for the 600M. Speed would be nice on a 7200 but I'm not sure on the heat. I don't need large storage (30G is plenty), I just want reliability first and formost. Longer than 2 years.

[glc]

Hit F12 when you boot up to get the boot menu, boot into the diagnostic partition and run hardware diagnostics, including hard drive diags.

[Jeff Lam]

Thanks glc!

I ran the diagnostic test and most passed till we got to the DST Short Status Test.

It FAILED

Error Code : 1000-0142

MSG: Unit 4: Drive Self Test Failed. Status Byte = 70...


So does it look like I need a new Hard Drive?

What do you think of those new 5400.3 Seagate or Hitachi 5K160 drives with Perpendicular technology? I hear they are close to performance with the 7200 drives.

[glc]

You really won't notice the speed improvement going with a real high tech drive - I've been putting 5400 rpm 8mb cache Hitachis into customers' notebooks lately. For maximum reliability I'd have to go with a Seagate. I have one in my Thinkpad and it's dead silent and runs cool.