Hard Drive Gone?!?

Tunarle

Junior Member
Oct 12, 2002
11
0
0
Hello All,

I have this really old laptop with a four gig hard drive on it. I installed Windows 2000 on it and it ran fine for a while. One day I was just surfing the net on it and I got a pagefault blue screen of death. I wish I had more details from it, but it flashed fairly quickly from view. Anyways I booted back up and the the computer just sat there with a blinking cursur, the way this old laptop reacts if there is no operating system found on the hard drive. Anyways I loaded with a boot disk, luckily I was using fat32, I looked to see if my files were there and they kinds of were. I did
cd\
dir
and it listed directories like WHNMS, which did not exists, and files such as AUTOEYDB.BBS and CPMJG.SZS. When I tried to cd into WHNMS it told the directory did not exists, then I dir again and it listed WINNT, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and CONFIG.SYS. Like the files just magically decided to change names and then back again. Well I decided to ignore this error, I ran my old bootdisk that had a utility to completely wipe the hard drive with zeroes, reformated and reinstalled. A few days later the same things happenned. I repeated this about 8 times, sometime using win2000, winxp, win98, and even nt4.

I'm pretty sure I am correct when I say it is a hard drive problem because first of all the pagefile is located on the hard drive, so if the hard drive were to mess up while in windows the first error that maybe detected is the pagefile if windows were trying to write to it, which it is always writing to it with my small amount of ram. Anyways, I'm guessing for some reason my hard drive cannot hold the file allocation table and master boot record correctly and that is why my hard drive seems okay for a while and then all of a sudden messes up.

Also I noticed that the letters always change one ascii value. A turns into @ or a B. C turns into a B or D. Y turns into an X or Z. So on and so forth. I doubt this helps figure out the problem any but just incase this is important somehow.

Like I said, I already have my conclusions, I just wanted some opinions on whether my statement is completely wrong or what not. So I appreciate any help in shining light on this problem.
 

LiLithTecH

Diamond Member
Jul 28, 2002
3,105
0
0
Probably a bad RAM MODULE or onboard cache.

Might want to try running memtest or similair program
to atleast rule it out.

Bad ram corrupts hard drives very quickly.
 

Tunarle

Junior Member
Oct 12, 2002
11
0
0
Thank you for your opinion. So I gave this a shot. I ran some memtest program that ran in Windows for about 2 hours, and it found zero errors. And Then I have ran Memtest-86 v3.0 for the past seven hours and it has found absolutely nothing. Is this sufficient enough to logically rule out the memory and assume it is actually a hard drive problem, or is there still something I may be missing?

Thank You
 

Tunarle

Junior Member
Oct 12, 2002
11
0
0
Okay, it's not extremely old. I'm talking 1998, Pentium 233 MMX (not p2, original pentium) .... 96 MB of RAM (32 built onto the system board and 64 on a chip) ... 4gig hard drive ... 12.1 inch screen ... If you need any more details just ask, but I would think that should be enough. It's an IBM Thinkpad 380xd, if that helps at all. I'd give you the exact model, but the model number was on a sticker on the bottom of the computer and over time it looks like that sticker has deteriorated.

Also could magnetics have caused this because I just realized how dumb I am. about 80% of the time I have this machine sitting on my bed, and I just realized I have the sub woofer from my desktop sitting directly under the laptop, and I'm guessing old hard drives have basically no shielding at all. Is this a possibility?
 

Tunarle

Junior Member
Oct 12, 2002
11
0
0
Oh by the way, I've been running Memtest-86 v3.0 for 21 hours now, and still nothing. Do you think it is okay to assume the memory is good?

Thanks
 

beatle

Diamond Member
Apr 2, 2001
5,661
5
81
Did you use the nintendo cheat code for memtest? :)

c-1-2-2-3-0-spacebar
 

Tunarle

Junior Member
Oct 12, 2002
11
0
0
Yeppers ... I made sure all tests were ran and the cache was always on ... or the nintendo cheat as you call it :)