Problem With My Dell Latitude D600

Morning all,

I was checking my email then all of the sudden, I got Dell's BSOD. I restarted it, when I got into desktop, BSOD again. So I decided restore (clone, I used it 2 times before this happened). The restoration was successful, but when I boot it up, after Windows logo, nothing, blank screen. So I did it again, restoring it. But again, blank screen.

Then I decided to do a fresh clean install of XP, but when I tried to delete that partition, BSOD. I booted up again from the XP CD, I found it had been deleted. So I made a new partition, and format it (NTFS - slow method), but when it got into the middle of copying the files, it said it can't copy the files.

In the moment, I am formatting the hard drive into massive one, instead of two partition. I doubt it that it will work.

What's the problem with my Dell Latitude D600?

Do you think that's the hd?

Just FYI, before this happen, I was thinking of upgrading the hd into bigger hd.

Thank you.

Edit: Yup, it failed. Btw, my D600 is at least 5 years old, original hd.

 

Everything you've mentioned seems to suggest a bad drive. If possible, I'd try to hook that drive up to another machine and scan it for defects (with the HDTune scanner, etc) before buying a new one.

 

Sounds like hard drive but usually you will here clunking noises from the arms in the hard drive. To make sure it is not another hardware item, I would boot up with a Memtest86+ CD and make sure it is not a memory chip, video chip, or something on the motherboard itself that is failing. Does the fan work? Let Memtest run a few passes. I usually let my tests run overnight. I also have a Ubunto disk that is bootable that I sometime use, but sometimes have problems with that due to driver incompatibility.

 

Check ram memory!

Some weeks ago I had similar problem: frequent BSOD.
I tried everything: HD format, Windows reinstall, Drives Reinstall... I finally found that one of my ram memory modules was bad running Windows Memory Diagnostic from Administrative Tools (W7). I removed the bad module and everything was fine again!

If you have two ram modules, test each module separately in order to find which one is eventually bad. I also use memtest86 CD boot, but this test surprisingly didn't get the problem... Only Windows Memory Diagnostic accused the problem for me.

 

Thank you both of you.

But VERY ODDLY, it somehow got fixed. I remember somewhere that sometimes RAM can causes these odd problems. So my last resort, I remove the RAM sticks, clean the connectors, and why not the hard drive also. Put back all together. Boot up, ran XP cd, partition, format...and successfully copy the files. When it done, I format the second partition, copy the clone image, from my USB flash drive, into second partition. boot the ghost CD, and restore. And it worked. In matter of fact, I am using my D600 now.

VERY ODD. But I am glad it got working.

 

If you can't even format your HD, it is probably the HD... In general, you can test the HD from the bios...

 

Hehe, exactly like me
It seems that with time you can get problems with ram memory. I learnt that after a hard time (like days) trying to do everything else... How did you clean your connectors? Purified Alcohol? Or the old school eraser trick?

 

Hehe.

I used alcohol to clean them. Just let them dry completely.

 

run a checkdisk on the drive. I'm guessing it will find some bad sectors (or a lot of bad sectors)


from a command prompt:
chkdsk /F c:

it will tell you it will check the disk on next boot. Reboot the machine, and wait.

 

It happened again. But this time, I removed one of the RAM, I got it working again quickly. Looks like I have a RAM gone bad. Hopefully, I got the bad cookie.