Hi. Friend called me last night. Her laptop (an oldish e-machines athlon-based lappy) is having problems: she says her hard drive begins thrashing, the system slows down and eventually crashes and/or hangs. Upon immediately power-cycling, she gets the error "Can't Find Operating System". If she lets the laptop sit for an hour, it'll boot fine and 20 minutes later the same thing will happen. Last night as a test I had her set the laptop on her deck for a few minutes (it was 16F outside) and retry. As suspected, the laptop booted fine for about 15 minutes.
She says her windows event viewer shows no SMART errors or anything suggesting a hard drive problem.
The "Operating system not found" error along with the thrashing hard drive suggests her hard drive is going bad. But the hard drive failures I've experienced don't "recover" after letting the drives cool off for a while.
Is it possible that this is simply an overheating problem?
She says her windows event viewer shows no SMART errors or anything suggesting a hard drive problem.
The "Operating system not found" error along with the thrashing hard drive suggests her hard drive is going bad. But the hard drive failures I've experienced don't "recover" after letting the drives cool off for a while.
Is it possible that this is simply an overheating problem?
