Laptop Hard drive, is it broken?

[Guest]

I'm having an intermittent problem with a laptop which I think is either a bad/marginal hard drive or maybe an ide controller...

Here's what it does...periodically it will refuse to boot from the hard disk, so I boot from a 98 start disk...it tells me that there is no partition information on the c: drive and that there are 3 possible causes 1) a virus 2) the disk needs to be fdisked and I forget the 3rd...

So, I took it apart and removed the hard drive, looked at it made sure it was properly connected and put it back together (I needed the model # for a replacement) Rebooted it w/startup disk, same error message about the hard drive, so I booted it with a Norton disk, no viruses found...

Here's the weird part...just for the hell of it, I restarted it and it booted perfectly (albeit it ran scandisk), I'm defragging the drive now and it seems to be running flawlessly...

So, anybody have any ideas what might be wrong with it, or how to test the hd? Thanks, sorry the post is so long, Happy New Year

 

[Guest]

Yeah it's not reading a partition table in the MBR sector when this message appears I believe (it's a good message to get when you removed all bootable partitions from your drive.. it's not when you know there should be partitions). meaning beyond what is listed and I don't recall the 3rd either you could have bad blocks, something else physically wrong with the drive, something wrong with the controller circuitry on the drive. Something wrong with cable, the interface, or IDE channel of the mb. Look at all those things that could cause that message. You can probably eliminate thath latter non drive-specific related if you have another drive in the laptop that doesn't show signs of this soon. Depending on the drive's features such as SMART you might could use a diagnostic program to verify the media, otherwise without some special equip, you won't really be able to determine if there is something physically wrong with the drive.

Still might be a virus (probably not if you checked it with an updated checker). I had a problem once like this that was caused by a virus.. I just said H**** with it an repartitioned and formatted it.


***Hey I run Intel... but let's get real***

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the info...I fdisked the mbr...still no luck...and that horrible noise it used to make is gone...so I'm pretty sure it's the disk itself that's the problem...the computer only works when accompanied by the bad noise...

So unless anybody thinks it's not the disk...I'm just gonna replace it and see...thanks again