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!?
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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
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Tsukurimashou Notebook Evangelist
It's the stock drive from dell?
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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!
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550, is that for a madly overpriced piece of hardware from dell?
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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. -
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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.
Free Fall Sensor is crap!
Discussion in 'Alienware 14 and M14x' started by RioRyan, May 29, 2011.