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Need help with strange problem

A

Archon

n00b
Joined
Jun 18, 2004
Messages
13
I have a laptop and basically I think the hard drive has died. All I can remember is running checkdisk with the /f parameter or something like that. A prompt came up telling me it wasn't possible to run the test straight away as the drive is in use. So I rebooted and since then I haven't been able to successfully turn my laptop on. I keep getting these blue screens saying stuff like KERNEL_INPAGE_DATA_ERROR or words to that effect. I also hear these weird noises as I'm booting up kind of like a scratching noise(it's hard to explain), and these noises usually pre-empt the blue screen. I came to the conclusion that my harddrive was buggered.

I have a IBM thinkpad R31 series laptop(1Ghz Celeron, 128MB RAM, 10Gb, intel extreme integrated graphics..blah..blah) and the harddrive was an IBM traveltstar 15N series one. Anyway my question is, would it be possible for me to buy any 2.5 inch hard drive slap it in, install windows to it and proceed like normal or are things more complicated than that?

I'm not looking to splash out on this too much. Ideally I'd like to spend something in the region of £70-80 and no more but preferably less. I'd like to get a hard drive with slightly better performance and reliability/stability :eek:
I'm looking at getting a Seagate momentus 20GB hard drive, is this any good?#

Any help is much appreciated on my part. Thanks for your time :)

ps: btw hi, this is my first post, been a long time lurker here.

edit: upon reading a little bit of the sticky FAQ at the top of the page, the noise it makes is definitely a click and it is very frequent. So in other words according to the FAQ it's read/write errors and I'm buggered :( though I don't know if it is the hard drive or RAM. The blue screen does come up but not very often, usually there's loads of clicks and my laptop reboots after I attempt to get into windows in safemode or normally.
 
1st the blue screens and the code (4 sets of 0x000whatever) are the most important indicator as to what is the problem, and since they are generated by the OS, your HDD is functioning (to one degree or another), you might need to do a reinstall, as Id guess that there is considerable data corruption and that it cant find critical system files (hense its thrashing around clicking, looking for them)

but post exactly what the stop error is and the 4 numeric codes ;)

2nd if your going to get another HDD anyway, its important to know what laptop it is (of what vintage) as there could be BIOS size limitations, where it will only recognize x amount of capacity in a HDD. there might be a BIOS update available for a larger capacity too, so post that info, (Ideally the make and model, and at the very first screen the BIOS make and version number, hit the pause button, might need to do a boot, and then a ctrl alt delete restart to see it it goes by fast sometimes)

3rd test your RAM, download memtest86+ and put it on a floppy, then set the BIOS to boot to the floppy 1st if it isnt already and let it run through a few cycles

Congratz on the 1st post ;)
 
Right well I tried reinstalling windows just now. My laptop just seems to lock up now, no blue screens. I tried using safe mode and it doesn't work either. At the moment I can't seem to reproduce the blue screen and as a result can't post the error codes.

My laptop is an IBM thinkpad R31 series, that's what I know. It's fairly old I think it's been two years since I bought it, don't know if that will be of any help. I remember getting the latest version of the bios, which is the 3.100 version I think. There was also a weird code in brackets next to the bios version which was 1FETFOWW so it looked like this on the screen:

BIOS 3.100(1FETFOWW)

I'll have to try the memtest thing. I'll get back to you on that one. Thanks for the response btw.

edit: I forgot, my laptop doesn't have a floppy disk drive. Will it still work off a cd?
 
Sounds like the same thing that just happened to me. And I have bad news, the HDD is bad. A couple of weeks before it happened it could hear the motor clicking so I figured something bad was about to happen.
 
So far I've run memtest and my laptop has passed the standard test 3 times with no errors. Does anyone know any config settings which would make the test a lot more thorough?
 
thats good enough for your current needs
displays DOS access, and that the memory isnt the likley cause of the issue
OK go to IBM and look for both a BIOS upgrade (of 2ndary importance if your not upgrading disks) and the HDD diagnostic utility, likely youll be redirected to Hitachi

we want to know what drive is in there (almost certainly a IBM\Hitachi) and if there are any errors or bad sectors, and throwing a "fake" low level format on it might help (zeroing the HDD)

the odds its the HDD (or a connection that is loose) have increased dramatically with the memory passsing those tests
 
There's something strange going on. When I run the default tests my system always passes. When I run the default tests with the "BIOS-All" memory option(I think that's what it is) it gives 39 errors and locks up.

This is what the errors look like:

Failing Address Good Bad Err-bits Count Chan
---------------------- --------- ------- ----------- ----------- ------------
00007d00000 ffffffff 0000000 07d00800 1


and so on. They all seem to have the same failing address but different Error bits. I have to take out the battery and the mains lead and then power it up again. Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't work. When I run a standard test again my system passes, I tried the BIOS-All test again and the same thing happened, 39 errors in the same manner as above plus my system crashed.
 
hmmmm that would seem to rule out the HDD as the most likely cause of the problem
and I think its likely youve got some sort of power issue, you have another battery?
what does it do when its just on the outlet?

Im not familiar with BIOS ALL
but then other than the very first computer I ever fixed (a dead HDD)
Ive had very little laptop experience personally

Im transfering this to Mobile Computing to get some additional eyeballs on it ;)
why dont you rethink the title to reflect the current situation and I'll edit it for you
 
I should have been a bit clearer. When I was referring to "BIOS- All" I meant the menu option by the same name in the memtest program's config screen(the one you enter by pressing c).

I don't have another battery. When it's on the outlet it runs fine as well. The only time my laptop seems to crash is when I try re-installing windows/accessing windows. I think I've completely buggered it now, as my hard drive doesn't seem to be detected. Also I have the most up to date bios for my laptop there are no newer versions. I've checked the IBM site.

I suppose I could rename the thread something like: " need help determining the problem with my laptop"

So what do yo guys reckon, should I bite the bullet and buy a new harddrive to test that theory out? Is it just a simple case of taking the old one out and putting the new one in? Or is it more complicated to install a new harddrive?

I can't seem to get the IBM diagnostic utility on their website working, I have it on cd, but it doesn't seem to be working like memtest did(where I'd just slap it in and it would start up on it's own)

Thanks for the help so far Ice Czar
 
RELOCATED to General Hardware
(this thread is taking a grand tour and GH seems like a good place till we can isolate the particular system likely to be at fault)

Archon said:
I've decided to go for broke and fork out for another HDD and hope it cures my problems. Anyway I was wondering if you could help me with something. Do you know if this --> http://www.overclock.co.uk/customer...324&cat=&page=1

hard drive is compatible with my laptop? I have the newest BIOS possible for my laptop, which is an IBM R31 series laptop(1Ghz celeron, 120MB RAM, 10GB hdd...etc...)
Click to expand...

considering that the next largest common BIOS capacity limit is at 32GB think in the capacity department your fine

and the cable interface is pretty standard but Im less confident of that
laptops are far more proprietary in particulars, when I replaced my last HDD in a lapotop there was no issue, and Id imagine the same here, but cant definitively say its so

so lets breifly review
your failing the memory test even on the AC outlet?
 
I always have my AC outlet plugged in. I haven't tried running a test on just the batteries alone. I'll give that a shot and post results
 
Ok, I left my battery charging overnight in preparation for this test. So that's about 10 hours worth of charging which I figure would be enough to charge the battery fully, or at least give me 1 hours worth of life out of it. However when I tried to test my laptop with memtest without the ac outlet, my laptop started bleeping(alarm for low power) after about a minute and a half. It then turned off as I wasn't able to get the ac outlet connected in time. I'm now running memtest but the ac outlet is plugged in. This must mean that there is something wrong with my battery right? But that wouldn't explain my problems would it? Because I always power my laptop using the ac outlet I never use my battery(because my laptop is basically my main system it only ever gets moved when I go to my cousin's house to play on his LAN).

Any comments?
 
Well I took out the battery for the first time since the problems started occurring and am now running on the ac outlet alone. This seems to have stopped the problem as I managed to repair my corrupted XP installation. I'm now able to enter windows and use my laptop normally, seems the battery may have been the cause of all my problems. Luckily I didn't order the new HDD(which I was going to do this afternoon). However whilst repairing the install I got an error message which keeps appearing now everytime I start up my laptop. It's quite annoying and it seems to slow down the startup process a helluva lot. It doesn't seem to affect my system in any other way though.

here is the message:

ibmpmsvc.exe - Application Error
--------------------------------------------------

The instruction at "0x00143a24" referenced memory at "0x000000c7". The memory could not be "written"

click on OK to terminate the program
click on CANCEL to debug the program

does anyone have any idea how I can solve this problem?

Oh and btw thanks Ice Czar. Thanks to your help and suggestions I am now able to at least use my own PC to do stuff.
 
Archon said:
Well I took out the battery for the first time since the problems started occurring and am now running on the ac outlet alone. This seems to have stopped the problem as I managed to repair my corrupted XP installation. I'm now able to enter windows and use my laptop normally, seems the battery may have been the cause of all my problems. Luckily I didn't order the new HDD(which I was going to do this afternoon). However whilst repairing the install I got an error message which keeps appearing now everytime I start up my laptop. It's quite annoying and it seems to slow down the startup process a helluva lot. It doesn't seem to affect my system in any other way though.

here is the message:

ibmpmsvc.exe - Application Error
--------------------------------------------------

The instruction at "0x00143a24" referenced memory at "0x000000c7". The memory could not be "written"

click on OK to terminate the program
click on CANCEL to debug the program

does anyone have any idea how I can solve this problem?

Oh and btw thanks Ice Czar. Thanks to your help and suggestions I am now able to at least use my own PC to do stuff.
Click to expand...

ibmpmsvc.exe is the executable for the ibm power managament service. I'd try to reinstall the power management driver/software from IBM, that'll likely fix you up.
 
^ thanks that seems to have fixed it.

However in the time since this post and my last post, I have had some more crashes(with the blue screen and everything). Only two mind you, so they aren't as frequent as before. But it still seems there's a problem.

However this time I managed to write down the error code produced. Here it is:

KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR

blah..blah...blah...contact admin stuff here

STOP: 0x0000007A (0xC03F1CCC, 0xC000000E, 0xFC7338EE, 0x056E8860)

atapi.sys - Address FC7338EE base at FC725000, Datestamp 3d6ddb04


One thing that did interest me was on the blue screen it mentioned something about disabling BIOS shadowing and caching. On my start screen I get the following:

BIOS 3.100 (1FETFOWW)

CPU = Intel(R) Mobile Celeron(TM) processor
640KB System RAM passed
256KB Cache SRAM passed
System BIOS shadowed -------> I've only just noticed these two
Video BIOS shadowed --------> lines on the startup screen
0122496 Exteneded RAM passed
Mouse initialized

Does anybody know what the problem might be? How do I disable BIOS shadowing? Are the two things related?

I would appreciate any help you can give me.
 
power issues are a leading cause of data corruption
and can also effect the memory
and as Ignad pointed out that first error is a power management service that is probably being borked by the hardware or by the corruption or both

as to the error in the last PM (and above)
http://www.xptuneup.com/xptuneup_stopmessages.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prmd_stp_fvlq.asp

again points to the memory and or the HDD (pagefile\virtual memory)
both potentially effected by the power

re BIOS shadowing
http://www.rojakpot.com/showFreeBOG.aspx?Lang=0&bogno=207
http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=8&var1=0&var2=187
http://www.rojakpot.com/showFreeBOG.aspx?Lang=0&bogno=204

and unfortunately I know next to nothing about laptop PSUs
and worse a power issue, is the leading causes of RAM damage.

So first you need to have the power supply\battery issue addressed and verified as good
then you need to test the memory again
then see if the HDD is functional

the trick is isolating the problem, and without eliminating the power as the potential cause
you could well end up running in circles, the reason I own 3 of my 4 computers is basically so I can cross part components
(and Id like that ability in my 4th as well, but that one is in my sig,
and I just cant afford that yet :p )
 
Sorry I've been away for a while. I thought I had the problem solved with the re-install of XP. However my system only lasted a few days and then the same problems kept occurring, I can't get into windows anymore. How would I go about verifying the power issue?
 
well theoretically gain access to the power supply and test it
but I know next to nothing about a laptop's implementation of power,
batteries or even the voltage of a laptop
 
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