Possible dead HDD on laptop?

I'm working on a person's nephews' laptop again this time it seems that the HDD in the laptop is dead. On the first few boot attempts Windows would start to load and then stop, now I'm getting the no bootable device message (yes I have double checked the BIOS). I attempted to run Fedora 11 Live CD and I got a strange error message so now I'm downloading fedora 13 and hopefully the live CD will boot so that I can confirm that the HDD is dead.

I don't know what he does to the thing, this is the second time that I've had to repair the darn thing. He's 12 btw.

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Comments

aethereos

Most HDD manufacturers have a diagnostic tool you can use.

Seagate has Seatools
IBM/Hitachi has DriveFitness
Maxtor has Powermax

and so forth. Download and burn the tool to a bootable CD. It should tell you rather quickly.

Good luck!

exampasser

aethereos wrote: »

Most HDD manufacturers have a diagnostic tool you can use.

Seagate has Seatools
IBM/Hitachi has DriveFitness
Maxtor has Powermax

and so forth. Download and burn the tool to a bootable CD. It should tell you rather quickly.

Good luck!

Thanks, I'll try that out.
EDIT: The hard drive starts off with WDC in the bios so I assume it's a Western Digital hard drive.

tiersten

exampasser wrote: »

Do Toshiba laptops have Hitachi hard drives?

Go look in the BIOS, boot messages or failing that, take the laptop apart.

exampasser

I did a quick test and got a "Read Element Error code 0007" Thanks aethereos for reminding me about the bootable diagnostic tools.

exampasser

tiersten wrote: »

Go look in the BIOS, boot messages or failing that, take the laptop apart.

I just remembered to check in the BIOS for it just before you posted for me to look there lol.

Plantwiz

exampasser wrote: »

Thanks, I'll try that out.
EDIT: The hard drive starts off with WDC in the bios so I assume it's a Western Digital hard drive.

Most likely, yes. WDC = Western Digital Corp.

Good place to start.

exampasser

I still find it odd though that I got errors when trying to boot from both a Fedora 11 and Fedora 13 live cd's, I guess the laptop doesn't like Fedora.

tiersten

exampasser wrote: »

I still find it odd though that I got errors when trying to boot from both a Fedora 11 and Fedora 13 live cd's, I guess the laptop doesn't like Fedora.

Search for the errors to see why it won't boot.

Plantwiz

exampasser wrote: »

I still find it odd though that I got errors when trying to boot from both a Fedora 11 and Fedora 13 live cd's, I guess the laptop doesn't like Fedora.

Are the cd's good? Perhaps they cannot be read (or read properly) by your optical drive??

Can you boot from a thumbdrive?

exampasser

I did the full scan disk option and it appears to have repaired the error

Plantwiz wrote: »

Are the cd's good? Perhaps they cannot be read (or read properly) by your optical drive??

Can you boot from a thumbdrive?

I tried the Fedora 11 cd on another computer and it worked fine. I'll have to find a spare thumbdrive and try that. Are there any distros that you recommend for using a thumbdrive with?

exampasser

The laptop is fixed! I didn't even have to reinstall Windows I just used the Windows 7 dvd and selected the repair option.

neuropol

I would still be wary of that drive. If it's failing it may work fine intermittently.

earweed

Have you retried the live disks? There could be an intermitent hardware problem affecting more than just your HDD.

TheShadow

Is the 12 year old not using shutdown and just powering off. Second possibility he is ignoring the low power message and it is aborting on its own. Those partial disk writes will show up as later disk errors. I have watched students tell each other to just wait a few minutes and it will power back on for a little while. They will keep doing that until they get random boot errors because they wanted to read one more email and had no charger.

exampasser

TheShadow wrote: »

Is the 12 year old not using shutdown and just powering off. Second possibility he is ignoring the low power message and it is aborting on its own. Those partial disk writes will show up as later disk errors. I have watched students tell each other to just wait a few minutes and it will power back on for a little while. They will keep doing that until they get random boot errors because they wanted to read one more email and had no charger.

I do know that he was not properly shutting it down at one time, I don't know if he has still been doing that for a while.