Dialing Tech Support

[PlatypusJesus]

A curious little matter. I'm interested in seeing other's thoughts on it. I know that there are people here who know more than I do. So, about a month ago, I began experiencing some interesting problems with my laptop. Files started becoming corrupt and unreadable, and my computer began freezing. While attempting to run chkdsk, it would freeze. When booting into safe mode, it would freeze. Absolutely impossible to do either of these two things. It would run relatively well, aside from the fact that I had to skip chkdsk, worry about random freezes, and the fact that more and more files were becoming corrupt. After some struggling to save my coveted music collection, I formatted the bastard and believed that it was all over. However, a day after I got home, the second time I had turned my laptop on since formatting it, the iTunes executable file became corrupt and unreadable. Chkdsk freezes. While booting into safe mode, it freezes. Does anyone have any ideas for this poor, ignorant, oblivious fool?

 

[Metal head87]

My desktop actually was suffering from something similar to that. I still haven't gotten a technician to fix it yet.
Telephone tech support is worthless.

 

[El Stormo]

It happens for one reason, and one reason only:




























Because you touch yourself at night.

 

[Lord Foul]

It could be the hard drive, but I'm more inclined to guess the problem is with the hard drive controller on the mobo. Do any devices show up as malfunctioning in the device manager tool?

 

[PlatypusJesus]

I have given it off to be looked at, but if I don't get a solid answer from them, I will check it out. If I can.

 

[EricT]

Because you touch yourself at night.

Thief!!!

Anyway, my guess is that the hard drive is developing a few bad sectors in an crucial area of the disk and when data is put upon those sectors "KABLOOM", it gets corrupted.

 

[PlatypusJesus]

That's basically my theory, Eric. It's the only thing that actually makes sense. My laptop has been shipped back and forth a few times, so it is perfectly plausible.

 

[EricT]

A replacement HD for laptops isn't too pricey currently... so if OUR theory is right, then you aren't looking for too much to replace.

 

[PlatypusJesus]

That's what I'm counting on. :-D

 

[Dead Winter]

That's exactly what happened to my desktop a few years ago...my hard drive just crapped out. So:

I bought a new hard drive, made it the primary in the BIOS, then connected my old hard drive to one of the other CD-ROM ports to see if I could still get my stuff off of there. Sure enough, I could. It wouldn't run Windows FROM that hard drive, but you could navigate through it as a secondary hard drive to store files and stuff. If I copied and pasted things, they worked just fine on the new hard drive.

Do that and take all of your music files, movies, and things that you don't want to lose and burn a DVD with them. Better safe than sorry.

 

[Mike]

Yo, LOM. When you freeze, does your HDD LED light on the front of your laptop blink slowly? And can you hear a clicking noise when its freezing, ususally a slow steady CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK. Mosre than likely its the drive itself, I doubt the controller would be causeing the corrupted files, usually a HDD controller with ANY problems at all would just cause drive failure.

I just RMA'ed my primary hard drive back to the manufacturer. I was freezing up alot and I would listen to my tower and it sounded like the hard drive was shutting down over and over again, making that click noise it makes when you turn your computer off, each time it would click, the LED would blink.



Take the hard drive out and go to another computer, go to the manufacturer's website and find the RMA section, type in your serial number and see if its still under warrenty, this way you can mail it to them and get a new hard drive from them for just the cost of shipping it out to them.

 

[El Stormo]

Thief!!!

Someone had to ^_^