Hybrid hard drive in laptop died; any way to revive?

Dougmeister

Senior member
Sep 15, 2004
568
2
81
I have a Toshiba Satellite U845-S406 Ultrabook. Started blue screening last week. Something about iastor.sys. I have a screenshot somewhere, but I'm not sure it's important at this point.

The hard drive in it is a 500GB, 5,400rpm SATA + 32GB SSD hybrid.

System restore didn't help. Toshiba support talked me into doing a factory reset. It failed with pretty much the same blue screen, and as an added bonus, left the laptop unbootable:

"Intel UNDI, PKE-2.0 (build 083)
Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation
For Atheros PCIE Ethernet Controller v2.0.2.3(05/18/10)
Check cable connection!
PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel PXE ROM.
_"

I tried booting to a Linux USB drive running PartedMagic.

GParted allows me to format both "parts" of the drive, then gives errors like:

"Could not stat device /dev/md/62AT5921ZGKK35VV - No such file or directory.
Retry Cancel"

TestDisk warns me of a head/cylinder mismatch, bad sectors (CHS and LBA don't match)

Yet "Disk Health" passes both disks, even in advanced mode.

1) Could it be that PartedMagic is too old and can't figure out the hybrid drive?
2) Is there a better, free Linux distribution that has a tool that can test the drive and tell me if it's really dead or not?
3) Same question as #2, but if it can be fixed, how to fix it?

Thanks.
 

Elixer

Lifer
May 7, 2002
10,371
762
126
You could stick the drive in a desktop, and see what it does there...though, it does sound like you need a replacement.