PureBasic Forums - English

a friend of mine have an acer laptop, and probably some water or something else was spilled into it. It has been dried up. All works well, however the harddisk tends to be very slow at times. Like it has an error or so. Can the cause be that something was spilled onto it?

It might, depends on how much water was spilled on it.
But it really isnt likely since the small laptop drives are pretty well rapped in metal and usually it is stuffed inside some kind of isolator. You could always run a test program to see if it finds any read or write errors on it.

Hi!

Its wasnt water it was orange juice i found out heh.. And it wasnt much however it might got into a hole or so, but not a whole glass or so.

However nothing is wrong with the ram, cpu, gfxcard, cooling or anything, and he pretty fast turned it with the holes down, and afterwards dried it.

Only the hdd seems to make trouble. HOWEVER, it is a whole new machine, itsnt it possible that it already had an error on the hdd?
Is there some sort of maintance/error correcting software out there? Currently im trying Spinrite with a level 4, and it has found an error in the start of the disc but couldnt correct it.

but notice, the drive works well in some cases, its like some sectors that are bad or so..
what to do?

I can't really see that it is likely for juice to come inside the drive, specially not inside where the wheel is moving the heads around, if that were the case the drive probably wouldn't work at all. If you have another drive laying around or a friend have one you could try to replace it and see if that helps. I have a really old laptop that I rarely use anymore after the harddrive crashed. That drive was 4 GB and I replaced it with one I had laying around which is only 420 MB hehehe.

back to you...
yes, it is possible the drive had problems from the factory, that happens, not often but it does happen.

Hi.

Well only the drive has problems... And yeh why would some parts of the drive work and not others if the joice meshed up the wheel??

Sadly i dont have a loose drive here.. I have another acer laptop but that works all fine, so i wouldnt risk that

Besides, the warranty still counts, i hope..


What if the laptop got a chok? i mean, it got hit or dropped..?


edit: btw spinrite keeps finding some errors in the start of the drive.. Any other good software out there that can help here?

The laptops can take quite abeating before they die. The one I have, Fujitsu 690 which has a 266MHz cpu has taken alot of abuse, trust me hehehe, but then again, the harddrive on that crashed, but I don't know if that was due to the beating or normal wear and tear after many years of usage.

I can't think of any alternative apps right now, but if I find some I'll post them here

Have you tried doing a lowlevel disk format? If it is the start of the drive that has problems you might be able to lowlevel formatt it and the bad sectors might get skippet.

Okay. How to perform a low level format? Is it just a normal format without the quick thing?

i found out, that the laptop HAS been to a trip to the floor! So that might be the reason...

wondering, how exactly can i do a low-level format? i dont know the manufacturor of the hdd..

Yeah might might be the reason it is acting up. If you listen closely to it when it is reading or writing you should be able to hear some sounds from it, if the drive is damaged the spinning stuff on the inside is probably touching the headers that reads from the drive. If that is seriously loud you should be quick to get a replacement drive. If it isn't too bad you should be able to use it for awhile, but remember it WILL get worn alot faster.

Try downloading Hiren's Ultimat Boot CD. You can find it by Googling. Formatting without enabling quickformat isn't the same thing. Using quickformat only 0's out the toc on the beginning of the drive. And normal format doesn't do much good either really. You can also boot from a Knoppix Live cd or other live Linux distro's and use the drive manager there.

Lowlevel format can take several hours to complete, if the drive is really slow, like my laptop drive, it can littereally take a day or two hehehe
But it makes a world of good for the drive, but shouldn't be done alot since it wears the drive each time.

Edit, try DiscWizard from Seagate, that is pretty good
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/dri ... scwiz.html

Active@Killdisk is a good one too
http://killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm#Booting_from_CD

Okay thanks! Ill try the knoppix disk manager since i have that around somewhere. The sounds arent loud, but it says a very small "Toc" sound.
Not really loud. well it is a whole new laptop so i hope the hdd is fast

Thanks a lot for all your help!

No problem m8

A little footnote:
If you do decide to send the laptop in for service to get it fixed using the waranty, and they check the drive, and they will, then you might end up with a nice service bill since "abnormal" use such as high Gforces are damaging to the drive
I know a friend who got billed a servicecharge for something he ment was covered by the waranty.

Anyways, let me know who it works out.

Hi!

We wont send it in ill change the drive manually.
However if it begins to work good, i dont have to change it right now..

Ok so here is what i did: Launched knoppix @the laptop, and then i removed all 3 partitions. i am so unlucky that acer chose to send some stupid "recovery cd's" with instead of a NORMAL windows setup cd..
That is VERY annoying, because what i wanted to do is: REMOVE all the partitions, then create the new partition in the END of the drive, leaving the first 5% of the drive available. I cant do that i guess since the setup cd's either wont work as there isnt the partitions it wants, or else it will remove whatever i did and make the 3 work again...

However, i couldnt seem to do a low level format using the knoppix cd, and besides formatting normally needs that i create a partition to format. Or low-level doesnt work this way???
If it doesnt, i would like to get more help on how to do that since i couldnt do it with knoppix [at least not the tool i used..]

Thanks a lot

I own a Acer laptop too, since January 2004. Exactly model Aspire 1500 and i'm in love of it.
Past month the hardisk falled down, and i had to change it. Acer Spain must give me now another (in Spain it is 2 year obligatory warranty for these thinks).
In the past i saw how delicate is the small motor of 2.5'' HD. And i'd dare to say that these motors can't support 1 year switched-on, like a server. This is a pity because i use my laptop day and night, it don get heat, it has a 9nm AMD64 and really the only part which results broken is hard disk, so i realized about 2.5'' HDs are the weakest part of a heavy duty laptop.

Hi!
The acer i have here is very nice, no troubles at all! I even had it with me in 3 weeks vacation in south africa. and in egypt.

Its a toshiba harddisk, and im not sure how to do a low level format. i have ontrack diskmanager here, however the laptop doesnt have a floppy drive.. So: how can i have the floppy "transfered" to a cd? Or other tools to do this? I have been looking for an utility from toshiba, but i havent found one...