I started having this problem a few weeks back and wanted to run it past you guys.
After being on for extended periods of time, 4-8+ hours, the laptop will reboot. At this point, it will fail to find the hard drive and goes into a continuous reboot loop.
I believe the first reboot is being caused by a heat issue because if I don't let it sit for hours, it will continue to fail to find the hard drive. It really seems like it needs to cool off.
Now the hard drive issue itself kind of concerns me. Nothing has changed on the system. The two fans on the bottom appear to be working fine. If the overheating is the hard drive, then I believe at a certain point it will simply fail. If the problem is the fans are not working like they should, then what can I do to fix it?
Keep in mind, this is a generic Laptop. You can buy this model under many different names.
I don't want to buy one of those laptop coolers.
Should I replace the hard drive or replace the fans? Any ideas on where I could get new fans?
hmmm, maybe the heat is stretching the container that holds the hard drive and is unplugging the interface? What sort fo HDD is it? Is it super fast? I can send you an older laptop drive. Also you could get a converter and put the laptop drive in a desktop machine to see if you can get it to fail there.
Bubba, It's either a 4200 or a 5400 RPM drive. I can't remember which.
OK, the plot thickens. Today, it started doing it right off the bat. Hmmm... Heat deffinately is not a problem....
Now, if it manages to get to the windows load screen, it reboots before makes it to windows. If it makes it to windows, it locks up almost immediately.
I bought some extra memory last year, so I pulled it. Same problems. I pulled the original stick and put the new stick in. Same problems.
I decide to boot into Safe mode just to see if it works. During the boot up, it tells me system/config is bad and I should use the Recovery CD. I boot up into Recovery mode. Everything goes fine and it dumps me into the Recovery console. I try to scan the config, but it tells me I need to do a chkdsk. I try to do a chkdsk and it can't find the drive. Hmmm....
Right now, I am trying to find my Windows Bootable CD Raze made for me. It has some tools on it to drill down deeper.
From all of this, I imagine I have either a bad hard drive, bad boot sector, a bad startup config or sector errors on the drive. The question is what is the best course of action?
What do you guys think? Am I chasing the right monkey?
I would try another HD in it and see if the problem persists. You can ghost your current HD over to it so you should not even have to re-install anything.
If it is the HD then another one would have to be installed anyway. 😉
I figured out why it is doing the continous reboot loop. I forgot XP has a setting to either show a blue screen of death or reboot on unrecoverabl error. Once I figured that out, I was able to disable that "feature" on the F8 screen. Finally, I got an error message.
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME - Well gee, tell me something I didn't know. ;-)
I did find more info in the MS knowledge base. It can be caused by an IDE drive that wants an 80 wire / 40 pin cable running a 40 wire / 40 pin cable. That's not it.
It is also caused by a bad bios setting that are configured to force the faster UDMA modes. Gotta look into this one. May just due a BIOS default restore to see what happens.
The file system is damaged and cannot be mounted. This last one could be really ugly. A buddy at work has a Laptop IDE adapter to USB. I'll see if I can borrow it and throw the drive on my main system.
Man, I hate troubleshooting computers, but sometimes I am glad I can manage my way around.
I'd say the least you could do is do a repair of it from a bootable CD, but that even has risks once the harddrive is failing. Also I had one that the bios battery went bad, thus forgeting the startup settings each boot. You may want to replace that battery first...
Try a usb external bootable HD.. But I'd bet you need to just bite the bullet, get a new HD and hope like hell you can clone your setup over. How difficult is it to take your case apart? Last one I had just getting to the HD was a bunch of broken tabs 🙁
Atomm wrote:Man, I hate troubleshooting computers, but sometimes I am glad I can manage my way around.
I get very sick of it myself. That is why I hate IT now days, a good chunk of my job is dealing with this type of thing and it gets old real fast.
Everyone calling when they have lame ass problems... GRRRRRR
Then again that is why they pay me but I still hate it.
Sorry I was not more help with your problem, I got in late on the conversation.
I have adapters to convert the laptop connection to a normal IDE connection and would also have suggested putting that in an external USB enclosure. I just did this for a professor that was sending his laptop to get repaired, he was happy to get his data off of it first before sending it away.
I really am more hands on and need to see stuff to really fix it. I would not be a good phone tech person 😉
lexx wrote:But I'd bet you need to just bite the bullet, get a new HD and hope like hell you can clone your setup over. How difficult is it to take your case apart? Last one I had just getting to the HD was a bunch of broken tabs 🙁
I have never seen a HD that was hard to get to on a laptop. The HD and memory are always easy, usually the modem as well. I have played with a lot of them.
You sure you simply did not know how it came out and did it wrong? Even older ones simply have a trap door, some even slide out the side.
Well, HD is hosed. I tried loading it via USB and BartPE Boot CD (Thanks Raze!). One of the tests could see it, but I couldn't access it. I did get a new error. I searched for the error and found a program called GetDataBack. It could see the hard drive. Right now it's trying to access it. I really hope this works. I have some web design stuff that I really don't want to do over. 🙁
We have a subscription to the Avast Bart CD as well. Subscription just means the ability to generate a new ISO CD image with the latest virus patterns etc... Great CD to have.
Well, GetBackData seemed to be working like a champ. Unfortunately, I can not say the same for my USB ports. They kept dropping down to 1.1 instead of 2.0. ARGH!
After 3 hours, It had only read 4% of the drive. 🙁 So, rather than burning up the drive trying to get the data, I decided to wait until I can get a 2.5 to 3.5 adapter and plug it directly into my PC.
From what I saw GetBackData seemed to be doing it's job. It saw a ton of errors, but it did read 4 million of the 117 million sectors on the drive before I stopped it. The real trick will be actually recovering something.
So WTF man, did you get the adapter? Did you fix the thing?? By the way just keep the adapter. If you didn't get it yet, it's gone I sent it on 6/6/06 at about 12.
look it's a whole page of me, Just me.... I <3 me. Damn I must freaking rock!! Maybe it's too late and I am too tired. I am corresponding to myself. <Dr Evil Voice>I miss you GRB :tear:</Dr Evil Voice>
:hmm: I hope you went to bed after that display cause I don't need you being all "emotional" in the office today because you haven't had enough sleep 😉
Yes, I got it. I was trying to recover the hard drive last night, but ran into more problems. My system only have 1 IDE (2xSATA). Since my OS is on the IDE Master, I made the laptop drive the IDE Slave. This hard drive is fuxored because it slowed my whole system down to a crawl. 🙁
I even moved my swap from the IDE to the SATA to try to speed things up. Didn't work.
Now, I have to rebuild my old system with 2 IDE slots and see if putting it on the secondary will speed things up.
Sarge wrote::hmm: I hope you went to bed after that display cause I don't need you being all "emotional" in the office today because you haven't had enough sleep 😉
Nope, I made the mistake of VPN'n into our network to check why something was weird. I noticed the network was as atomm would put it fuxxored, was then up a few hours working on that.
Atomm, sounds like the right path to take, although, I honestly wouldn't expect too much more speed. My guess is that there are enough damaged sectors it's slowing everything way down. Good Luck