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Bad Hard Drive?

P

P2Mc28

Member
OK, I knew this was going to happen when I first got this system, seeing as I had already had to recover data from it once after Win98 refused to boot, then again just recently. However, it wasn't mine then. It belonged to a "client" of sorts. But after this latest data recovery scare he just said keep it. So I did =)

Anyway, it's an old laptop; an IBM Thinkpad T20. About 5 years old. The former owner has told me he's had the hard drive replaced once before but these problems still occur.

I've reformatted to NTFS, installed WinXP Pro, and now while trying to use Windows Update, it (the website) will give me an error message stating a problem occured. I won't be able to use the website successfully until I restart.

There are also random program crashes. I'm not totally convinced it is a bad hard disk though, since I would suspect there would be corrupted files and whatnot. However, before I reformatted it did appear that there was.

Anyone have any suggestions? I was thinking of getting a new cheap hd, since the rest of the thing was already free, but I don't know if that would solve anything, since the laptop might just be "genetically" bad.
 
Look at your system log with event viewer. If there are disk errors there, then d/l the diags, otherwise look else where for your problem.
 
OK... well after viewing the Event Viewer, I noticed quite a bit of errors. The diagnostic wasn't able to do much, since apparently the S.M.A.R.T. feature didn't work. I don't remember what exactly S.M.A.R.T. is/does, but it's broke on that drive =).

Thanks for the help guys. However, before I go out and get a new drive, I need to know what caused this. This is the second new harddrive this laptop has had (with the same problem). Could this be brought on by a bad battery? I know for a fact that the battery is no good and I need to replace it. Could it be damaging other parts?

 
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