Dad's laptop HDD gone..?

[newbuilder14]

I'm posting this on behalf of my dad... I really want to help him with his laptop... he had a lot of work that hasn't been backed up on his Maxtor 250gb external since a week ago.

Here is what happens, the computer starts, and a really weird, indescribable noise occurs - it is like a really loud, annoying hard drive, trying to find something. It gets as far as the XP load screen, then starts to show the logon light blue screen but turns blank. It will repeat and make weird noises.

I suspect a bad hard drive unfortunately, but maybe just bad sectors? It is making a weird noise, but why is it beginning to load XP?

It is an Averatec laptop and they probably put a cheap hard drive in it - BIOS calls it PH-randomnumbers. Not a WD or Seagate I know.

So what comes to your mind with these symptoms?

Thanks so much, hope he doesn't have to buy a new one - he probably wouldn't just get a new hard drive - it has a 1.8ghz Athlon 64 in it with 768mb of memory.

[glc]

The hard drive is shot.

[newbuilder14]

Thanks, unfortunately I think you are right.

We went and bought this laptop at CompUSA - http://www.compusa.com/products/prod...130us_Notebook

[newbuilder14]

Just wanted to ask real quick - what is a good hard drive replacement for the Averatec 6200?

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1680465,00.asp

Pref. inexpensive and 40-80gb range.

[hitchface]

Yeah, HDD noises are no good. I had one make a terrible clicking noise...its usually the little needles locking up and doing the sorts of things that hard drives shouldn't ever do. Not really repairable considering the platters n all.

As for replacements...Seagate makes 40 gig notebook drives.

[newbuilder14]

Thanks. Would an ATA-6 work? That seems to be the norm over at Newegg.

[hitchface]

I didn't see what kind of mainboard the lappy had, so I couldn't say whether or not ATA-6 would do the trick.

[newbuilder14]

It is from 2005 if that helps. Cannot find the actual specs but it runs an SiS chipset.

[glc]

ATA-6 is compatible with any laptop that uses IDE and has a bios that can see the capacity.

[newbuilder14]

Here is the deal:

Went to CompUSA and bought a Seagate 40gig which I had CompUSA install since I didn't want to deal with those small constraints.

Took it home, and found that the BIOS had listed a very similar drive name for the hard drive, so I'm 99% sure it was the original one being listed while the new drive was installed.

Now, I loaded the recovery disks and the same thing occurs: it cycles and never actually boots up. I noticed some extremely hot air coming out of the fan. I really cleaned the fan and heatsink out with compressed air, though.

My guess is one day the heat got to it and blew the motherboard in one or more places. Remember, Averatec used a so-so SiS chipset to begin with.

My dad wanted to know if there was anything else you all would recommend doing to it or just throw it out? He has a new laptop now anyway, but we were still trying to get this one up and running.

Thanks.

[hitchface]

For a machine with a so-so chipset that is giving you trouble, is it worth it? I'd open it up and learn a few things

[Panama Red]

Blowing out the fan area doesn't necessarily clean the dust/dirt out of the laptop. Mine was crashing and emitting a lot of heat recently so i took it apart to check the cpu heatsink. The fan area was clean but that is the INLET. the back of the heatsink was plugged with dust and wouldn't allow any air to pass over the fins. I removed the hsf and cpu, cleaned it all, added AS5 and reassembled. Runs nice and cool now with no problems.

[newbuilder14]

Thanks PR I will talk to my dad and probably try that. If not, I will probably part it out and learn something besides just throwing it away.

[newbuilder14]

Bad memory turned out to be the problem..

Go figure. It was working fine with the memory for quite sometime.

Can't completely tell if the hard drive was dead or not, because we had a new one installed.

[Cricket]

Originally Posted by newbuilder14 Bad memory turned out to be the problem.. Go figure. It was working fine with the memory for quite sometime.

It happens. I've had to replace RAM that worked in computers for at least a year before the BSODs or instabilities started. Most times RAM will be bad right from the start but in some cases they do go "bad" over time.

Cricket