Storage Is my Laptop Hard Drive knackered?

Hey All,

My laptop has started to throw some odd symptoms at me recently, on boot up it will, if I try and launch any program, just freeze up. I can get feedback from the mouse, but it does not recover.

If I let it boot up I can get some use out of it - I tried running HDTune, the quick test goes fine, but if I leave quick test unchecked then it gets to a certain point about 12GB into my disk and then freezes up - it's done this twice. Spotify was running in the background and that stopped playing as well.

If I leave it for a while after it crashes it reboots, after the screen goes black for a while.

Running CHKDSK didn't seem to fix anything - which leads me to think it's a hardware issue?

Any Advice?
Sam

PS: this may have been caused by some idiot sigh causing it to lose power whilst shutting down... whoops!

 

Do you know what brand of HDD it is? Some companies have utilities on their site that you can download and run that allow you to diagnose hardware problems on their HDDs.

 

Aaaah - good thinking, I'll have to strip it out when I get home - will get back to you on that!

If I do have to replace it are there any specific drives I should be looking at? Or are they all very similar - for load times is there much benefit in having a 7200rpm drive for example?

 

They're all very similar to be honest. However you could also look into replacing it with a SSD. Then you wouldn't have those troublesome death clicks to worry about

 

7200rpm drives are usually quicker than 5400rpm drives of a similar age, older 7200rpm drives can sometimes be slower than high platter density (5400rpm) newer drives though.

Downsides are increased battery usage, some firms like WD, reckon their Scorpio uses the same power as a 5400rpm, but I found that not to be the case.


SSD will give you better battry life and much better performance, at the price of capacity. I had a Dell 1747 with two hard drive slots, so used SSD and a conventional for storage, best of both worlds.

 

run seatools for dos on the HDD it will check for errors works on aobut 95% of all drives.

 

So does HGST Drive Fitness Test. It will SMART test but not full diagnostics.
Download as iso file and burn image to CD. Set BIOS to boot from CD and restart.
I would also check your RAM with memtest+

 

OK - I got my laptop's hard drive out - it's a Western Digital Scorpion Blue - I downloaded their own disk checker and I ran a quick test. It completely in 2 minutes completely fine on my desktop (samsung drive) and it took 22 minutes and then came up with an error on my laptop.

​

It's not looking good... I will be putting my SSD in my laptop in the future, however it's only 64GB and so isn't up to storing everything, so I need a decent sized hard drive to go with it. I'll run seatools and HGST to see what happens with them.

 

I just ran SeaTools Short Disk Self Check and it failed.

Would you agree that it's very likely that there is a Hardware fault? Or could the old format sort things out?

EDIT: Just failed the Long Disk Self Check as well!

 

My thoughts would be a failed/failing HDD, yes.

 

seatools tests blocks on the drive and if it finds something it cant read thats when it fails.

rule of thumb if it fails a seatools test get a new drive