Absolute Hard Drive Hell on T61p

This past weekend I made what I thought at the time was a small mistake. I left my T61p on, running off the battery and forgot about it when I went out for the night. Not something I would encourage doing, but I shrugged it off at first because it's going to happen at least once in the lifespan of your notebook. That's why power management exists.

Well, to my dismay, booting it up the next morning I was met with a black screen when trying to load Vista. I also run Ubuntu, so to clarify: when I selected my Vista partition from the GRUB loader, all I got was a black screen. I then attempted to load the backup partition, with this I was met with a similar black screen but with a disk error message. This did not look good.

I need to note here, since I didn't earlier, that the state in which the laptop was left was idle at the Vista desktop. Not something I would think would cause major corruption on a sudden shutdown. Ubuntu booted just fine and seemed unaffected. Because of the situation, I was using it quite a bit while trying to fix this problem. I couldn't mount my Vista drive from there either, which I've always been able to do.

I reached the conclusion that Vista must have been in the middle of running a backup to the hidden partition, as I can't imagine any other way both partitions would get corrupted while Ubuntu was left fine. There had to be data going from one to the other.

After this realization my first step was to format my Vista and hidden partitions. I decided this was a good time to follow the clean install thread in this forum, albeit with a few variations as I just borrowed a Vista Ultimate DVD from my roommate and used my key rather than the upgrade anytime DVD.

My attempts to install Vista kept failing when it got to the Installing Updates step. I planned on setting up two partitions, one for Vista and programs, and the other for data. When readying the partitions for the install with the Vista DVD, I formatted these two partitions. Oddly enough, just having one partition formatted while leaving the rest unallocated got me past this step and what appeared to be a completion of install.

After the first reboot I would get an error about a corrupted driver in the system32 directory. Unfortunately I don't remember what that driver was. It told me to run the repair windows feature on the DVD. I did and it found no errors.

After this I decided to go a step further and format the whole hard drive, Ubuntu and all. I didn't have any personal files in Ubuntu and installing it is such a simple process compared to Vista, I was ok with this at this point. Attempted another Vista install, same problem.

To see if this was just Vista related I decided to reinstall Ubuntu, first on its own partition. It hung up toward the end of the install. Then I installed it on the whole drive as a single partition and the install completed. It worked fine for a while but then after a couple reboots it started to load very slowly. Once in the GUI I could highlight icons and drag the selection box around, but not open anything or use the panels to open menus. The hard drive kept chugging as if hopelessly searching for something that wasn't there. I hit Alt-F2 to exit the x environment and came to find a repeating error along the lines of "ata1.00 drdy err". I assume this is HDD related.

I realized at this point with all this reformatting using the utlities on these OS's installation disks had probably heavily fragmented the drive. I needed to do a low level wipe. I found a bootable iso with a ton of utilities including wiping programs. I've never used anything like this and was only able to understand 1 out of the 5 wiping utilities that was included and this was a free version of a particular utility only offering a single pass 0 method unless you buy the full version. Tried it, and after an hour and a half attempted Vista again.

Everything was getting further than it had before. It finished the initial phase of the install and rebooted, got the Vista loading screen and then the message about it preparing to start for the first time. The little progress dots get really far along, but then toward the end it just hangs up. I let it go for an hour and it finally rebooted itself and then took me to the windows failed to boot properly screen. Tried loading safe mode and it hangs when trying to load crcdisk.sys.

This pretty much brings this story to where I am currently. I booted with the DVD and am running the repair windows feature right now. It is actually running the repair as I write this but is taking a very long time. It does say it could take over an hour, and it hasn't been that long yet, but it's getting close. I'm not very hopeful.

My inclination is to delve a little deeper into that utility and see if I can find one that will do a multipass format. But is this fruitless? Am I looking at something else entirely? Is some other piece of hardware inhibiting this process? Before attempting the multipass I suppose I should give Ubuntu another shot and see how it fares after the single pass format.

I realize this is incredibly long but I hope a few of you actually read this and can give some input. This thing is beating me down. I've only had this machine for a little over a month. I bought it refurbished and can't remember what kind of warranty comes with it. I need to look into that. I didn't buy any extra coverage. I can't fathom that the hard drive was actually physically damaged from running out of battery life, but maybe I'm just naive.

If you made it this far in reading this, thanks a lot for your time.

 

I also don't understand this unless something happened physically to your laptop.Like did it fall down or something?

Or can you get another HDD to see if it works well in the laptop?

Regards

 

No, no dropping or anything else physically violent. It was just sitting on a table, undisturbed.

Not sure how I would acquire another laptop hard drive to test, but it would be worth a shot if I could.

Will be attempting Ubuntu soon.

One thing I haven't tried yet are the recovery cd's that came with it, that are basically copies of what was on the hidden partition. I really wanted to be able to do a clean install but at this point that's worth a shot, and probably should be attempted anyways if I end up having to call Lenovo.

 

Installed Ubuntu. At 79 Percent it just randomly stopped and booted the OS from the CD. Attempted another install and it completed. Upon restart, loading takes a really long time. Finally takes me to the GUI with an error saying the GNOME daemon could not be loaded. Never seen this error before. It seems like the one consistent thing about all of this is that the problems aren't very consistent. If it's not one thing, it's something else.

One last idea popped in my head before trying to find a way to run a multipass format on the disk. When you install Ubuntu and it brings you to its partition manager, you can choose manual and much like when installing vista you can choose to delete, edit and create partitions. Within these options you can choose whether to place the partition at the beginning of the disk, or the end. I decided to try one more install while telling it to place the Ubuntu partition at the end of the disk. With this I completed a successful installation and am currently in the OS without any errors. I have rebooted once without any problems and am in the process of updating my software sources to download some video support and a few other things just to see how everything is working.

If Ubuntu continues to work normally this tells me that there is either permanent damage to a section of the disk toward the beginning of it or it is severely fragmented to a point that a single pass format couldn't fix it. I honestly don't know a great deal about the actual science behind how a hard drive works, so I don't know if I'm naive in thinking that a multipass format might do better to fix this problem than the single pass did. I've tried nearly everything else under the sun, so why not?

 

Have you tried running a check disk or anything equivalent to see if you have bad sectors or even a bad head?

With it being so random, I also wonder if maybe you had a surge or some other power fault from the battery that has caused damage to something on your motherboard.

 

I haven't actually run a disk checker but I think I'll do that now.

How would I test the motherboard? I've been able to load the BIOS just fine. Not that it means much. But it doesn't really seem like a motherboard issue, though I could be wrong.

I equate the randomness to trying to install over bad sectors thus corrupting whatever happens to be written on those sectors.

 

Ok, so I probably should have run a disk checker in the first place, but yesterday I finally ran Drive Fitness Test that Hitachi provides and sure enough a bad sector was found. Could have been more. I think I remember it saying 1 or more. Anyways I went ahead and attempted a repair without a full wipe and it failed, giving me an error with a specific code. I looked that code up and it's related to a bad sector, while there are codes related to bad heads or other mechanical problems.

I have little hope since the full wipe I did earlier didn't seem to fix these sectors, though I was using a third party tool. But I guess the only other thing I can try is to try to repair with a full wipe with the Drive Fitness tool from Hitachi which may work better, being from the manufacturer.

Does anyone know what the warranty on a refurb covers? If I really do need a new hard drive and Lenovo won't fully cover it I'm pretty sure I'd be better off buying a new hard drive and installing it myself, unless lenovo's fees are under 50 bucks, which I highly doubt.

 

Tried to erase disk with Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test utility and it couldn't even do that. Got another failure code. The first one I got was 0x70 which is apparently related to a bad sector. This time I got 0x75 which is a component failure. Great. This just gets better and better.

So basically my HDD is toast, for sure. My next step is to call Lenovo I suppose.

Again, anyone know what their warranty on refurbs covers?