Notebook diagnosis

[fragment]

I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100 that was given to me by work, however, the reason they gave it to me was because it borked. Since I am short on money but in need of a laptop, I took it hoping I could fix it.

I tried to reformat the hdd because it would freeze the operating system and take a long time opening a program, so I considered just reformatting and reinstalling the operating system. However, when it came to the format section (via W2k) it would format up to 99% and then bork claiming that the partition was unformattable and I needed to make sure my partition were correct which led me to the assumption that it is the hdd that is broken and not the motherboard, am I wrong?

 

[TheCanuck]

Sounds like the hard drive is messed up. You could try a low level format using something like Kill Disk:

http://www.killdisk.com/


After the low level format is done you could try to partition the drive (i.e. make the C partition around 10 gigs and leave the rest alone until Windows is installed) and then install Windows -- it could be that there are bad sectors on the drive near the "end". I'd also make sure the grills for the heatsink dont have any dust in them (blow some compressed air through the vents) to rule out overheating, and run a memtest to make sure the memory in the laptop is good:


http://www.memtest.org/

 

[cy7878]

just buy a new HD. you can pick up a 6Gb model for about fifty bucks. Go to Newegg.com or Basoncomputers.com and see how much you can spent.