stupid laptop!

aueddonline

Just having a look at this laptop for a friend,

The OS had been really slow and then crashed the other day when running a defrag, the hard drive is broken right?

But then

I take a look at the bios at boot and see that the drive is showing as disabled and there isn't an option to enable it anyway. I manage to boot for a linux live CD ok, I switch off the laptop and remove the harddive and ram to get model numbers but when I put them back in the system doesn't even do a bios check, nothing happens, I didn't do anything that could have broken anything.

So what's going on, is the motherboard screwed?

skrpune

when you say that it "crashed" when running a defrag, what exactly happened? Locked up or rebooted or just flat out died? And does the power indicator light come on at all on the laptop?

If a PC's not booting, there's a couple possibilities:
- bad RAM or poorly seated RAM - if it was not reseated correctly, then that could be it. Bad RAM could also be causing the laptop to act 'funky' - if it overheats, it could cause poor performance or sporadic shutdowns
- bad CPU - overheating over time decreases performance & also causes sporadic shutdowns; you taking out & reseating the hard drive & RAM wouldn't make it die completely all of a sudden, but the final death throes of the CPU could just be something that happened to coincide with the removal/reseating of other components.
- bad motherboard - it is entirely possible that the motherboard is on its way out, but that's hard to tell without looking at the motherboard (not as easy with a laptop as with a PC) and/or ruling out all other options.
- bad power brick/jack. I've not got much experience on this part, so I can only comment broadly here, but obviously if you're not getting good power to the laptop, then you're not going to get much of a reaction from it when you try to turn it on. Again, this isn't something that's related to you removing/reseating the HD & RAM, but could just be a coincidence.

I'm assuming you've already done this next part, but in case you haven't, check the connections for the HD - if it's not connected/seated properly, that could be fouling up the boot as well. (Although my experience is that if you've got a not-quite-connected HD, normally you'd see an error message that the OS is missing or something of the like.)

By the way, what makes you think that the hard drive is "broken"? Did the laptop's owner do something in BIOS to change the settings recently, or has the HD always been "disabled" in the settings? And where exactly is the HD disabled, in startup options? I just can't see how the hard drive could be disabled in BIOS and still have allowed you to be monkeying around with it and doing defrags from within (I'm assuming) Windows.

If you can, download a diagnostic boot disk for the specific brand of HD & run that - it's the best way to figure out if you've got a bum HD on your hands. If you can't find one for that HD's brand, then try Seagate's SeaTools boot disk. It is able to run at least preliminary diagnostics on all brands of HDs that I've come across so far.