Anyone have any hard drive problems on 6860?

I am pretty sure that my hard drive has gone out, right after the bios finishes loading my laptop goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper right hand corner. It wont go past that no matter if I boot from the hard drive or cd room (winxp, vista, ubuntu, gparted, none of the cds work), however if I remove the hard drive it boots from a cd just fine. I talked with gateway tech support and their suggestion was that I should first try buying a non refundable $20 recovery cd becuse that should fix it (even though no other bootable disk load). So has there been any others with hard drive problems?

 

I haven't had a bit of trouble out of either of my hard drives. Knock on wood.

 

Have you tried reloading the OS to the drive? Or have you booted from the disk and tried to let Vista repair the problem (from the OS CD I mean)? Or for that matter just booted with any kind of disk that will let you access the drive to verify if you can read anything off of it? Just because it's not booting, it doesn't mean the hard drive is bad. Could just mean that your windows install is corrupted. I would try to read data from the disk before calling it a hard drive issue.

Good luck!

 

the only problem i've had is the plastic pull tab ripping off.

 

the gateway solution is surprisingly (sarcasm alert)BS, if you cant get past it while booting from cd, there is definitely something wrong with it.

remove the hdd and connect it to other machine using a usb enclosure, run scan disk with all options on. there are better software for drive recovery pm me if you are interested.

 

My bad, that's what happens when I post past my bed time...lol! I see it won't boot with the hard drive in, even to CD. royk50 has the idea. If you have, or could borrow an enclosure, that would work great. If it doesn't show up, you know there's a real problem with the drive.

If you don't have access to an external drive, I'd keep working with Gateway if you're still under warranty. Call back and see if you can get another tech, preferably one that knows what he's talking about.

 

I havent had a bit of problems with mine. But i upgraded to 2x 320 7200rpm scorpios almost as soon as i got my 6860.

But the original drive is now a data drive in my HP laptop and its still running like a champ.

it does sound like your drive has failed though. Its bound to happen, even western digital makes some crap products sometimes (inevitable with electronics...especially with electronics with mechanical parts)

You might want to get with these companies
Western Digital (usually they have a good warrenty system)
Best Buy (if you have their extended warrenty plan)
Gateway (as currently their customer service has went in the crapper, but its still an option)

Usually WD will do a drive swap out for you if its not some antiquated hard drive, and if not i'm sure you can talk the geek squad at BB to swap it for a new drive. They should have the 320 5400rpm drives on the shelf.

 

Thanks guys for the help, I dont have access to a enclosure, I have another crapped out sata drive which I tried to find an enclosure for, but no locally sells them. I am currious after looking at the back of it, can I simply plug it into a desktop pc as a second hard drive with standard sata cables? If not I will get a hold of WD or BB, however I didnt get the BB warrenty, so I wasnt sure if they would do anything.

 

i bought one from best buy a few week ago. it was a rocket fish enclosure, but i returned it when i was done using it.