Technology, Support, and News Forum

[ar1stotle Profile ICQYIM]

OK, just want some verification as to whether or not my diagnosis here is correct. I'm working on a laptop that will randomly freeze. Right after it freezes, I hear the HDD spin down and either just stop or lock or something. It never comes back on, only thing you can do is a hard-reset. I ran a quick chkdsk, which found a lot of corrupted data, was hoping that would fix it but it didn't. I just tried to run a chkdsk /R last night, but it froze at 11% of that last process that takes forever. Just no more HDD activity. To me, it seems that the HDD is defective. Any reasons I should look into it being anything else?
It's a dell inspiron, btw.

[mnemonicj Profile]

I am not sure if this works anymore, but Dell used to have a button combination that you could press during boot up that would perform a hard drive scan to see if the hard drive is faulty. The button combination is Ctrl-Alt-"D" during the Dell splash screen at the beginning of the computer boot up. I am not sure if Dell does it anymore, but it is worth a try. At the end of the scan it will tell you if the hard drive has failed or not.

EDIT: I just tried it on a 2 year old Dell PC and it works. Hard drive passed.

[ar1stotle Profile ICQYIM]

OK, there was one on this laptop but it was in the boot menu instead. HDD fail.