Hard Drive damaged? Pls help!

I have an HP Pavilion zv5230us running Windows XP.

A few days ago, it started acting really slow (for example opening an explorer window would take 20 seconds). I scanned for viruses and spyware and found nothing. I defragged my HD.

Then, it started acting even slower (e.g. 60 seconds to open up an explorer window or firefox). Then, I got hit with the blue screen of death, and it would restart. This happened 3 times, and now windows won't boot.

When trying to boot, I would get two alternating scenarios:

Scenario 1). Before it gets to Windows it says:

Those last two lines (with PXE...) repeatedly flash and it will keep doing this forever until I power off.

Scenario 2). Windows would tell me that it was shuttdown improperly and gives me the choice to start in safe mode, normally, etc. Any of these options caused it to freeze.

Since I had backed up my hard drive, I decided to reformat and do a clean install of Windows using the CD. During setup, I deleted the old partition and created a new partition. Then it started to format the new partition (NTFS) but then gave me this error:

I'm not sure where to go from here. Is my hard drive damaged? Is it possible that the hard drive connection needs to be jiggled?

Normally, in a desktop, I would start replugging stuff in, checking cables, etc. However, I'm totally clueless about troubleshooting a laptop. I've never opened it up before.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

Any chance you have a spare laptop hard drive to test it out? Probably not or else you would have tried it. If you aren't hearing horrible clicking noises from your computer, then you should try to find a hard drive casing. These let you plug in laptop hard drives and boot it via a USB port in a desktop, I believe. If it doesn't work, then you're hard drive is the problem. I'm referring to something similar to this

http://www.allcam.biz/products/usbpk.html

I searched for "laptop hard drive enclosure".

 

The drive sounds dead to me. Do you know who made it? Most HD manufacturers have diagnostic programs you can download, burn to CD and boot from.

I suspect it's time for a nice new Seagate or Hitachi 5400RPM or 7200RPM HD. Swapping HDs in these machines is easy, just remove the battery, remove the drive, remove the adaptor on the drive's IDE connector, move it to the new drive, drop the new drive in, replace the battery.

 

I got that same error in xp setup but on my desktop pc with a maxtor HD. I'd get that error at the end of the reformat process. So, I decided to pop in windows 98 disk and formatted the HD into a FAT. It worked fine, no probs. I rebooted again, but this time with XP in. Did the NTFS reformat and I did not get that message again. All is well and the hard drive is fine. I know...kinda funky...

 

Update: It's a Toshiba MK8025GAS and the drive is making weird noises, louder than normal.

I was able to reinstall XP on it and boot it up, but it's still really slow and after about 5 minutes it will give me blue screen of death and restart.

 

Wow.. I would really try JasonSnake's idea it sounds like a good way to bypass a stupid error before you go out and buy another hard drive.

 

Well, I tried it and it's still doing the same thing.

I'm running Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test (advanced). What exactly am I looking for when it finishes?

 

Test Results:

Does this mean my HD is fried and I need to buy a new one?

 

There is a manual for your program and it states:

Hope this helps.

Regards, VidKo

 

That's good if you need to keep the drive, but if you can spare the money for a new drive then you should buy one. Once sectors fail to the point that the HD diagnostic programs notice there's too much risk that more failures will follow, soon. Consider this to be a convenient reason to upgrade to a bigger/faster drive.

 

Its time to dump that sucker, RIP.

 

Im pretty sure its not your hard drive. I had the same problem.
I deleted ALL partitions and reinstalled windows.

All fixed . Try it.

 

As I am selling my girfriends notebook, I wanted to securely erase all date from her harddrive. I ran a program called Kill Disk, which erased all partitions and data from the drive.

When I rebooted without the cd I also got this message:

Realtek RTL8139(X)/8130/810X PCI Fast Ethernet Controller v2.13 (020326)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM

I just popped the CD in, and started installation.

In your place I would make a low level format of the drive and reinstall Windows.

Regards, VidKo

 

Do you think doing a zero fill would work?

Isn't there a for sure way to tell if the drive is physically damaged or not? I'd rather not buy a new drive if this one is still ok.

 

If it has bad sectors, it would not help by filling zeros. That disk is dying or dead. So get the replacement under warranty.

"Realtek RTL8139(X)/8130/810X PCI Fast Ethernet Controller v2.13 (020326)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM"

You get that bove networking error, because it can not boot from HDD, so it is trying to boot from Network and that too can not find anything to boot from network.

 

I want more space, I'm gonna replace it with this one. What do you guys think?

 

That is pretty good, I think. If you can afford you could try 7200RPM drive, more responsive( 7200RPM drive prices gone down since few weeks).

 

Do you know where they sell them?

 

Hitachi and Seagate make 7200RPM notebook drives. Newegg and Zipzoomfly sell them, Mwave too I think.

 

I'd still say the simplest thing to try is what I mentioned earlier. No money is spent, but a 7200 rpm drive is tempting at the same time.

 

Jason,

Thanks for your advice. I did try it, and I'm still having the same problem.

Also, using AutoClave (from the Ultimate Boot CD), I did a 10 pass erase on the disk. I then ran Drive Fitness Test and it's still giving me a device error. Also, I tried to reinstall Win XP one final time after wiping the drive and it's still acting the same.

It's time to put this drive to rest. She's worked hard for me but I have to let go.

I've decided to go with the 5400rpm 120GB Samsung drive cause the 7200rpm one is so much more expensive.

Thanks for all your help guys. These forums are great!