Free Fall Sensor is crap!

Okay, I'm sure it's the free fall sensor in my m14x that's screwing things up. I did a clean install of windows 7 because it was acting strange. Randomly, the HDD will just go "dead". Windows explorer freezes, nothing moves but the mouse, and the HDD light doesn't illuminate. This lasts anywhere from 30 seconds to 1 minute. I thought removing the driver software for it would help, but it made it way worse! It was so bad I didn't think I would be able to get it re-installed, but I did. Now it happens randomly, and it's super annoying. It's the 750GB 7.2k drive.

What do I do!?

 

Do u have the WD hard drive or the Samsung hard drive?

I remember seeing a thread on the M17x forums about the Samsung hard
Drives being bad. I could be wrong

 

try disable the free fall sensor in device manager see if it helps

 

It's the stock drive from dell?

 

Yeah, it's the Dell drive.
ST9750420AS Momentus 3Gb/s 750-GB Hard Drive | Seagate

That's the product page for the exact model.

In Device Manager there's "ST Micro Accelerometer" but there's no disable, just uninstall. And last time I did that it didn't go so well.

 

I would certainly get a replacement hdd. And you know you want a SSD!

 

Sure do. It's the $550 extra that's holding me back.

 

550, is that for a madly overpriced piece of hardware from dell?

 

Theres commands to disable the free fall sensor. Check the Seagate website.

Once its disabled check the SMART attribute FEh, it should be 0 or disabled.

 

It could be a hard drive that's bad in some other way. Check the free fall sensor, but you may not be able to fix your problem with that.

I believe the accelerometer has its own option if you go to the control panel. It may even get an icon in the system tray. Right-click the start bar and check that the free fall sensor's icon isn't hidden. Lastly, you could try typing "msconfig" into the Run box, locating the free fall service or process and preventing it from starting.
You may have a working free fall sensor and a bad hard drive, though. In that case, you need to get Dell to fix or replace it.

 

ahhh ya got me. In any case though, really don't have the extra cash to throw at an SSD

It seems to be running better now, but I still face odd freezes once in a while... And sometimes if I'm installing something and music is playing, the music will stutter for like a second. Is that normal? And how would I convince Dell that the HDD needs replacing if it came to that?

 

Normally just send them a email and copy + paste the symptoms you have written here, and they dont really to send a technician to your house due to the cost. (A 750GB hdd is cheaper than the labour cost here in UK) Chance are you will find a brand new hdd in your letter box in few days.

 

You should try removing the Intel Storage Technology software and see if that may be causing a conflict of some kind.

I was getting flakey behaviour with my SSD.

May be totally unrelated, but its worth a try.

 

Update and funny story

So, I called Alienware tech support on this and the agent connected with that alienware connect whatever where they basically VNC your screen, and he ran some hard drive tests, but it wasn't freezing when he was on it! It was on its best behaviour, the little b****rd. So he ran the test twice and during the second time he opened up the nVidia control panel, which interrupted the hard drive test and when he went back to it there were results so poor he concluded that it needed replacing.

So now they're sending a technician out to replace the hard drive and the RAM too, just in case.

A couple hours after the call, I started it up again, got the "no boot device" screen.. F12.. hard disk.. booted into windows and was freezing left and right again.

 

Sounds like a faulty HDD to me. Hopefully getting it replaced will fix the problem. Even though it is basically new I never rule out faulty HDD or RAM.