[RayFairhurst]

Laptops come with cheesy hard drives - and slow ones at that.

I'd replace it with one with speeds at least 5400 rpm, and 7200 rpm is even better.

A 5200 rpm harddrive from a company like Seagate or Maxtor is almost always twice as fast as the stock drive.

But yeah, once the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) reports the drive is going, it's usually done - but not always.

Before trying to reformat the drive, shot down the computer for at least half an hour. Often, the drive is running hot and won't work right.

[v74ClzKY]

i have had limited success with removing bad drives and knocking on them several times and re-installing them to get them to boot-up for limited data archiving. not really much you can do except to replace it, but the re-formatting that was done ruined her chance of being able to salvage the data herself.

also you can buy usb conversion kit's w/case for laptop drives for about $10-$15 shipped, if you had a functional laptop hdd, but didn't want to spring for a new usb-external hdd

[anolbom]

I get that plenty of times on mine, it's true - laptop hard drives suck ass! Hope you got it resolved, ouz.

[nancywind]

Got a call from mom on the third about my laptop at home running bad. Heres the details on what happened, any advice on resolving the problem would be great.


Here is what it did:
I turned it on and it was really really slow. It did let me on the internet
but at the same time there were other things going on and messages popping
up all over saying stuff like , unable to write to the hard drive, etc,
etc. When I would try to open a program (not internet) it would be really
really slow and so I went into utilities and ran the virus scan. It showed
nothing and took forever to run. So I opened the defrag program and it said
it could not be defragged. So I rebooted the computer. When it came on it
came up to a screen that said hard drive failure eminent, back up system
and replace hard drive. It said F1 to continue, so I did f1 and it had
several options to open of which at some point in time I tried all of them
none of which worked. So that was when I called you about reformatting the
drive. It started, got 20% through it and errored out. I kept trying it and
it kept giving me an error in the same place so I am thinking the hard
drive is just done. I just hate to pay someone to look at it, then find out
I need to replace the hard drive and have money in them looking at it too. The hard
drive currently in the laptop is MK4021GAS. Since I don't know anything
about them I figured I should just get the same one but if you find a
compatable one that you know will work that is fine too, just let me know. I have the restore disks, and the operating system disk, and found Office disk but
if you can think of anything else I might need that you have there... Do you think I need a whole new hard drive?

Thanks,

Kevin

[Fvmfrctt]

Replace the hard drive, all you can do.

[RogerButton33]

hard drive failures are usually the motor that turns the discs inside the unit, or the bearings that keep it rotating smoothly.

the hard drive sensor(s) probably picked up a signal that shows minimal wobbling, but more than the specs defined by the manufacturer. and thus puts out the eminent hard drive failure message.

best to replace. the only issue is replacing pictures, music, movies, et cetera.

if no major issues on personal data, chuck and replace that bish

[orbidewa]

If you're still able to backup all the data I suggest using a HUB-link external hard drive (one of those big metallic 40+GB things) to temporarily put all your information on it. The only thing left to do is replace your hard drive and believe me, shit happens to hard drives ALL THE TIME. I've replaced mine a few times before. So backup all of your data, if you can that is, replace and then throw it all into your new hard drive. In my case, I lost all my friggin' data and there was nothing I could do about it.