Losing the plot. Hard Drive failure/error/General idiocy.

Good evening Notebookers, let me start by saying tonight is by far one of the worst ever for me, I spilt water on my emulsion hardboard wall and it blistered and peeled, I tried to get it off and now I have ruined the wall having to primer it and stay up all night to repair it as it requires 5 coats and costing me 40 quid!

However back to my laptop. I had a friend over tonight to watch CSI latest episode and I run it through my laptop into my xbox (remember this is after the wall incident so nothing else could go wrong surely) for no reason whatsoever and I kid you not here I had not touched my laptop for about 2 hours went onto the desktop to fire it up and blink dark screen and top left hand corner flash "unknown hard drive error" and my laptop shut off. I switch it back on it tries to fix windows startup nothing happens and restarts and it just goes back to trying to fix it again. No safe mode, No nothing. Took 30 mins before we could watch CSI. Mega pi**ed.

It did this 6 weeks ago same thing for no reason at all hard drive failure, I have again reinstalled windows and its running fine although I now have to once again spend 12 hours getting everything working, all my settings back, drivers and not to mention suffer the audio and touchpad issues whenever you factory reset.

Before I go to this trouble does it sounds like my hard drive is on the blink? its the stock one that came with it 16 months ago my secondary is a brand new 500GB.

Is it SSD time

 

Get a SMART utility to read the health info from the drive.

You can also find bootable utility CDs from drive manufacturers like seagate seatools or hitachi drive fitness test.

 

Already ran HD Tune and health is all ok and error logs both confirm all ok

Could this have been caused by a virus maybe?

 

If HDD health is fine, perhaps its a problem with the sata connectors.. When this happened did you try to swap the boot drive to the other connector?

 

Tried everything fella literally everything and its so random but I have no access to anything no safe mode, boot fix fails, it cannot find my factory partition. I think i was a virus the first time it happened but a clean install should fix that surely.

SSD beckons.

 

Since you opened her up a few times, i would check the cable connecting the sata board to the motherboard. I didn't get the same error message, my drives weren't recognized since the cable was completely unplugged but if it's a bit loose it might be causing errors (well i guess). Can't hurt to check though.

 

I see you had a problem with that cable but mine has a lot of slack and its definetely connected if it was loose it wouldn't cause an error, fail and then install windows perfectly fine again. I think its generally on the blink or was a virus I think I may have picked up.

 

Good to know, i never had HDD problems so i didn't know if a loose cable (not completely disconnected) could cause errors or not, hence the reason i said well i guess .

 

IF you dont pinpoint the issue, you may get the same errors with a ssd too... Also before placing an order for one, surf the manufacturer's forums.
I did that AFTER i got my SSD (which was a compulsory purchase due to a really good offer that popped in my inbox) and it scared me to death... it was full of complains as unrecognized at boot, lost data, bricks, bsods at sleep/hibernate and so on...
Luckily i have absolutely no issues yet, but still...

 

Not sure if it will help, but Ultimate Boot CD has some hard drive diagnostic tools that Groceries mentioned. You can try the WD tools or the Seagate tools depending on which hard drive you have.