8.9-inch Acer Aspire One said to have hard drive flaw

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/26/8-9-inch-acer-aspire-one-said-to-have-hard-drive-flaw-distaste/

Caution to all Aspire One users?

 

Hi, a tad early for April Fools isn't it? ;-) It's not so much a hard drive flaw, but a build issue, however this has yet to be substantiated...
Chris

 

Strange I'm gonna be downgrading soon to maybe a net book and been looking at this one. Hopefully they fix the issues.

 

Engadget can be really late on the news.
The problem has been discovered by "me" on aceraspireone.com/forum 4 month ago.

It's probably due to the power supply inside the acer aspire ones unable to provide stable power output instead of the speaker's magnetic field generated.


Here's some reasoning behind why: Considering the amount of magnetic interferrence generated by the speaker, it's amount is tiny compared to the magenetic field generated by the harddrive arm, harddrive motor ...etc. Remember, magenetic field decrease its energy exponentially the further away. The right speakers are about 5cm/2 inch away from the harddrive. You'll get more magnetic interferrence from a laptop cooler with a fan than you can get from those pair of underpowered 1.5w speakers.

It's not only the speakers that's causing the problem.
Increased screen brightness, high volume, constant hardddrive access, heavily used wifi, overloaded cpu can all cause "BSOD, hdd data corruption...etc"

These effects of the "power problem" have already been well documented a couple month before the articles are written. You can checked them out on www.aspireoneuser.com/forum if you want. All the effects can be reproduced easily and some workarounds has been found.

 

fwiw, this happened to my better half's daughter today - in just the manner that doesn't make any electromagnetic sense.

She was listening to music at max volume on her Aspire One; a loud squeal showed up; she shut it down. Trying to boot now gets you the XP startup screen, then "Unmountable boot volume".

I'm working on installing Recovery Console to USB now and then trying fixboot/fixmbr. I've been through the drive with UBCD and it looks generally okay, but haven't been able to run chkdsk yet.


Jack: I wandered AspireOneUser for a while and didn't see anything about workarounds or fixes. If you could please post up a direct link to a thread, that'd be great.

 

http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=12758

Last post has some links to more information. I couldnt' find all of the posts because it was from such a long time ago.

The workaround is using a option in realteck control program called "Limit Output". This will generally prevent the "crash". Also, turn down the LCD brightness, disabling unused hardware through device manager will also help.

Some people also switched the power mode for the wifi to "none" or "Maximum".

 

Ahh... I got it, "unstable 5v rail". so it's current load causing the rail to drop off. That makes more sense (of course).

Okay, back to getting recovery console on a stick! (I have the instructions, just working through the hoops). I hope this fixes this one!


Thank you Jack!

 

All of the symptoms have alreayd been throughly tested and can be reproduceable.

Reliability decrease if more 5v a drawn through the computer. E.G. USB HDDs, Wifi, screen brightness...etc.

Plugging the netbook to AC fixes 98% of the problem.