Laptop problem - Help please.

dcGT

Hi All,
I'm having a problem with a laptop. It's some spurious make 'Clevo', it's about 18 months old with Win2k on it. It's a grand machine but it has started acting up a bit recently (past month or 2) Here are some of the symptoms. I'm not sure what could be causing the problem.

1. Starting up - when it get's to the colour 'Starting windows' screen, and the status bar can be seen, sometimes it takes minutes for this status bar to complete. (Doesn't happen all the time)

2. Windows disk checking - Sometimes (again doesn't happen all the time), after shutting the machine down completely, I boot it up again later, only to find that windows goes into it's 'Disk checking - press space to skip' routine. It's as though the disk was corrupt or the machine has not been shut down correctly. This problem is occuring more and more frequently and sometimes takes 30 - 40 mins for it to complete the disk check! Sometimes the machine reboots itself at this point too (before windows starts)

I'm guessing at the moment that it may be the Hard disk. I have never gotten any dodgy blue screens/rebooting that I've gotten before with memory problems, so I'm thinking it may not be memory.

Has anyone any ideas of what it could be or any things to try that could narrow the problem down?

Cheers,

DC.

gibo_ie

run a defrag on your HDD, then scandisk. This will tell you if it is FUBAR or not!

Dr Bolouswki

sounds like hard drive alrite - if you can back up your data it might be worth doing a reinstall - download a hard drive checking utility from somewhere - but beware, as this can sometimes stress a damaged drive and make it collapse totally - best idea is back up first and then test it

this link seems useful - but if you google 'hard drive test utility' you get a million links for them - pick another if it looks nicer!

http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/english.html?/be_hdd2.html

DBK

Sounds like the hard drive alright. Check the amount of space available as this could be messing with your virtual memory. Try defrag'ing the drive to see if it helps as you haven't mentioned any noise coming from the drive to indicate a disk head problem. I'd probably start backing up data anyhow if I was you, just in case. If it's running the disk checker all the time, the OS probably didn't completely shut down, it could have been still writing to the disk, again, pointing to a disk problem.

dcGT

Thanks for the advice people. I'll try a few things out and let you know. I think I'll try a re-install of the OS to eliminate a software problem.

Cheers,

DC.

dcGT

Quick update, I did a full scandisk of the drive, and there are several bad clusters throughout the disk. Time for a new disk I reckon!

Cheers,

DC.

maxheadroom

FYI, "Clevo" is a company who make original laptop designs which then get bought by the like of Dell and rebadged. Its generally cheaper to buy them direct from the ODM (Original Design Manufacturer).