Laptop problems

[P2Mc28]

The hard drive on my laptop is no good. The S.M.A.R.T. feature refuses to function, there are bad clusters all over the place, and diagnostic programs can't even run without running into Unhandled Exception errors. This is the second hard drive this laptop has had, with the same exact problem. Could this have been brought on by a bad battery?

I just recieved the laptop a few days ago. I've learned that the laptop will function so long as it's plugged in, shows a 100% charge on the battery and all is good (except the pelethora of bad clusters all over the place) but once it's unplugged, Windows hasn't a clue how much time is left... it jumps from 2 hours, 11 minutes to 1 hours 9 minutes and back up again. After a while, it drops to >10% and hibernates.

Anyway, could this be the cause of the damaged hard drives? Could it be something else? Since I got the laptop for free, I wouldn't mind spending a little dough to get something I could code and do homework on. But, I don't want to invest anything into a laptop that is doomed.

Thanks to the guys who helped me confirm the hard drive was totally crapped out.

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Bad battery causing a HDD to fail? No. Virtually impossible. If the b attery runs down and you don't have the laptop configured to power down before the battery dies then you can get corrupt data on the drive if the laptop powers down during a write operation. But it won't cause permanent damage to the drive.

It's normal doe the ESTIMATED battery time to vary. Windows calculates this time based on the current power consumption and how much charge is left in the battery. You start using more power and your estimate goes down. COmputer starts idling and the estimate goes up.

You should download the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic utility and run a full (Advanced) diagnostic on the drive to verify that it's a hardware problem.

 

[P2Mc28]

I tried the diagnostic program already. However, it does not execute to finish. It is always interupted by an unhandled exception error. Additionally, it says that "S.M.A.R.T. is bad."

As for the battery, I forgot to mention that the battery lasts on average less than 3 minutes on a full charge before it hibernates.

I know the hard drive is damaged. I just want to start finding a cause, since it's kind of wierd this is the second time it's happened.