Help with a diagnosis

Y

yee245

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 12, 2007
Messages
178
Recently, my Inspiron 6000d started having issues and would BSOD before finishing loading Windows. I don't happen to have the error code anymore, since it didn't seem to be very specific, but when I looked it up, one or two sites mentioned something about a driver issue relating to the hard drive, or something along those lines. I did a repair of the Windows install just to see if it would fix the problem before resorting to a complete reformat, and it seems to have worked such that Windows actually loads up. But, I noticed that it was loading much slower than usual, so I did a quick test and came up with this:



The drive itself is a 60GB 5400rpm PATA drive. The drive temperature is probably up because it just "installed" (i.e. repaired) Windows maybe 5 minutes prior to testing. Also, one thing to note is that on a couple occasions, a window popped up (from centrino hardware control) that mentioned something about some SMART problem, though I was not using the computer at the moment and the window would go away relatively quickly, so I don't know what exactly it said. I did a couple tests and the drive seems to indicate that it working normally and the drive has no bad sectors. I don't think fragmentation would cause anything this bad, and Windows indicates that the drive does not need to be defragged.

I was just wondering if anyone else had a better idea of what the problem is, whether the drive itself is going bad or if there is just a bad/missing driver for the drive or something else I'm unaware of.
 
Well for one, that is way too hot for any hard disk for my tastes, especially for a 2.5" notebook drive. It's not healthy for the drive to be operating in such high temperatures, IMO, and would be prone to overheating failures that way.
 
Post some screenshots of the info and health tabs in HDTune? SMART errors are never a good thing.
 
I just did another benchmark test, just to make sure it wasn't the temperature that was the problem.

Benchmark:


Info:


Health:
 
Bump.

Can anyone tell if this looks more like a hardware or software related issue? I may try putting it in an external enclosure and benchmark it over that to see if the problem still exists. I'll report back later after doing that.
 
Well, those drops in the read speed could be a couple of things.Something may be accessing the drive. Do you notice the drive active even when you are not doing anything?

It could be the drive encountering errors, and trying to reread or remap the affected sectors.

If you have important data on the drive, copy it now. Then go to the manufacturers web site, find the support section, and download the CD copy of the DOS version of their diagnostics, burn the CD, and run the full/complete/long test on the drive.

SMART only picks up about a third of drive failures. That is better than none I guess.

Oh, BTW, it looks like that is a IBM/Hitachi drive.

Don
 
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