Troubleshooting Laptop Hard Drive Failure

Note that these steps correspond with decision points on the flowchart and are reached through the interactive diamond symbols. The text below cannot be read sequentially.

Is the LCD or monitor live? The first step in troubleshooting hard drive problems is determining whether or not you are dealing with a hard drive failure or something else entirely. Some non-technical people will refer to the any computer part that isnt a monitor as "the hard drive." If your LCD screen wont light up, the problem almost certainly isnt related to the hard drive.

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Does Windows or whatever operating system you are using boot? Does the laptop start up normally, get you all the way to the desktop? If the OS boots, unless you are dealing with a noise issue, the problem youre having is either software related or an accumulation of errors on the drive. If youre getting very flaky errors, having difficulty when connected to the Internet, are seeing large scale file corruption or data loss, the problem is more likely due to malware (bad software such as a computer virus, spyware, trojans) than electronic or mechanical failure. However, if the operating system disk maintenance software, such as ScanDisk, is reporting errors every time you run it, if you see text messages about "write failures" or if successive surface scans report a large number of errors, your hard drive is actually failing. If you believe the hard drive is failing, back-up all of the data that can be read and replace the drive.

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Will the laptop boot with AC power adapter attached? If the laptop boots up with the AC power adapter plugged in, the problem is with the battery, not the hard drive. Proceed to the battery troubleshooting flowchart. If you notice the hard drive performance seems to degrade badly when you are running on battery power, it means the power management is turning off the hard drive after too short of a delay on no activity, probably just a minute or two. You can change the power management setting to increase the shut-down delay for the hard drive or to ensure the hard drive remains spun up as long as the laptop is turned on.

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Does the laptop boot if you remove all external connections? If you have any external devices plugged into your notebook, printers, cameras, PC Cards (the replacement for PCMCIA cards), external keyboards or mice, network cables, monitors, unplug them all. If the laptop is sitting in a docking station, remove it. If the laptop boots when all of the external connections are removed, the problem isnt the hard drive, its a faulty external device or signal. You can determine which device is preventing the OS from booting by process of elimination. The problem isnt necessarily an hardware failure, it could be the driver for that device is so unfriendly or corrupted that its stalling the boot process when called to manage its client
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