Laptop HDD Dead? Any options?

Markus123

Markus123

Markus123

Associate
Joined
16 Feb 2007
Posts
110
Hey,

A few days ago my sisters laptop started running slow... I've just had a quick look at it and the problem appears to be the HDD:

hden2.gif


^^ HD Tach only registers ~2MB/s in the read benchmarks.

Basically... I'm wondering if it's likely to be completely broken, and I need to buy a new one. Or could something be causing it which a certain hard drive diagnostics/advanced setting could fix? I've tried 5 different S.M.A.R.T monitoring tools and they all reported the HDD healthy 99-100%.

Any ideas what to try? Or is it a throw away jobby? :(

Thanks in advance!
 
Your CPU utilisation looks remarkably high there, have you checked to see what background processes are running or have you done any virus scans?

It could well be that the hard drive is knackered but holding on for dear life, I'd certainly suggest backing up everything you can just in case.
 
When not running the benchmark CPU usage hovers around 0-3% so no background processes seem to be causing it (well, not that I can see anyway). I backed all her documents up straight away and did a virus scan but it found nothing.

I also just finished running Fujitsu's own hard drive diagnostics tool... and it says the HDD is fine, how can it not be picking up an average read speed of 2MB/s as a problem? Copying files takes forever, as does opening applications - but once they're actually open and in memory they run pretty smoothly.

Thanks for the reply, looks like I'm going to end up having to buy a new drive.
 
I had similiar symptoms on the Laptop in October last year. I ended up ghosting an image to an identical drive, and popping that in. The machine went back to running perfectly.

Old drive still sitting here on my desk, not really sure what to do with it atm.

Ps. It is a Dell laptop, it took 5 minutes to boot, and 10 mins to open outlook. Now it takes around 1.5 minutes to boot (it loads a lot of rubbish forced un us by system policies) , and opens outlook in less than 30 secs (lots of .pst to open).

Called Dell, gave them the whole story, they made me download the diagnostic disk, it passed so they washed their hands of it. Told me it was a software issue.
 
Is it an IDE drive? Might be running in PIO mode if it is (check the _controler_ properties in the hardware manager). Had this problem with a IDE DVDRW recently that wouldnt burn at more than 2x and used up a ton of CPU power while doing it. Strange thing is it just dropped to PIO on its own, I hadn't been messing with any hardware or drivers.

I not sure how I fixed it but I think I may have uninstalled/reinstalled the controler.

Also, making a backup of the important data on it is probably a good idea even if it's not dying :D
 
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