I could use a little advice troubleshooting a laptop

[Rob_63]

I am working on a Dell Inspiron 6000 with a Celeron M, 512 Mb Ram and I believe it has an 80Mb Toshiba hard drive in it.

I tried to load windows XP and it usually locks up right before finishing. I was able to get it installed several times but the first time it had multiple errors when doing windows updates, other times it just runs extremely slow or locks up. Now I can't even get windows fully installed on it since it locks up before finishing.

One thing that may be of importance is I am not able to do a complete format during install, it just freezes right on that screen, (doesn't even start to move the bar on the graph) only the quick format will work.

I have taken off the covers on the backside and blown out the dust, the fan does work so I don't think it is a cooling problem

My guess at this time is the hard drive is failing, but I don't have any other laptops that I can use to swap parts with so I would like to be sure of my diagnosis before I buy any parts for it.

Any suggestions/ideas?

thanks!

 

[Crizza]

Download the Ultimate boot cd iso and run the HDD diagnostic tools from it, better yet, get the Hiren cd if you use newsgroups.

It's either the hard drive or the IDE controller.

 

[zasquatch]

I would do what Crizza said and also make sure the memory card is fully seated.

 

[Rob_63]

Thanks for the tips, I have already double checked the memory seating and that was good, I am in 3 hours of memtest now. I'll leave that run all night while I am at work and then try the UDcd in the morning

Thanks!