Dell Latitude HDD Error

A few months ago, my mom's Dell Latitude D510 failed to boot with the following error:

A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

When I tried to access the drive through my external enclosure, I got some error or other about needing to mount or format the drive or something. If it is needed, I can look around for the old HD and see if I can get the exact error.

So, I posted a thread here and got a recommendation for the Samsung HM160HC as a replacement hard drive. I installed that, and all worked well for a few months, until just recently. The exact same error occurred. However, this time, the drive is not completely inaccessible via the enclosure, but the heavily used folders and contents seem somewhat corrupted when I try to copy/recover them.

I'm going to try booting Ubuntu on the affected laptop to see if everything else works fine. So... my question here is, does anyone have an idea what could be the cause of this problem? The laptop worked normally for a couple years before generating this error, and now it seems like it's not correctly reading/writing data to/from the hard drive. Also, should I run HDTune or something on that drive and see what the diagnosis is?

TIA,
-pixelot

 

Can you post up the health tab from hdtune?

The error can be generated by windows becoming corrupt, or it could be caused by a harddrive going bad

K-TRON

 

Thanks for the reply, K-TRON. I'm on it.

Update:

Alright, the health tab wasn't showing anything except n/a, but it showed the same thing for my HDD, so . Anyways, I got it to run a scan on the HDD in question, and here is what the result looks like so far. Not good, eh?



Also, when trying to copy/recover files, I get an I/O error. Oh, and here's another cute one: "The path is too deep." Lame excuses for not copying.

 

Can you install software like NHC to monitor the hard disk temp? I've seena few hard disks cooked by overheating cpus over long periods of time.

 

That is messed up... as in not normal
A defective drive caused by bad clusters should not be solid red all of the way through and through.

Did you run that hdtune from the laptop, or from an enclosure?

If you are testing it in an enclosure over USB, the health tab will be empty, since S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics cannot be read over USB without doing something special. (There is a way to get it to be read, I just cant remember how to do it)

I almost want to say that the drive is defective but I cannot be sure.

Is the drive detected in the BIOS when you plug it in your laptop?

K-TRON

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try it tomorrow or something... that would certainly not surprise me, as my mom's computer runs hot already, and always gets put on the CARPET, despite my warnings. Grrr.

Enclosure. Yes, that makes sense about the health tab. I'm pretty sure the drive is defective, just like the last one. It's weird. Both drives that have gone into that computer - I think it eats them. I'll try plugging into my laptop...

 

So I'm pretty sure heat was the issue here. I took the laptop apart and cleaned out all the dust and carpet fuzz, and I'm thinking about ordering another hard drive, and maybe a cooling pad.

But I do have a question first. I have some Arctic Silver 5 compound left over from my desktop build, so I was wondering if it would work to apply some of that to the CPU/heatsink here? See pictures for reference.





TIA,
-pixelot

 

No reason it shouldn't work. People use AS5 on laptop CPUs all the time.

 

Yours truly does the same.

Yeah, I'm not sure what allows SMART info to be read over the USB interface. All I know is my $10 interface will read it though.

It's an Antec external interface I bought at Frys.

 

Since from the pictures you've already pulled off the heatsink from the CPU, you'll pretty much have to use AS5 or some other TIM to eliminate the air gaps. I mean, you can put it back on now as is, but your CPU temperatures will spike occasionally because the heat transfer to the heatsink won't be even.

 

Yep, I used AS5.