Signs Of A Dying Pc

[junkofdavid2]

For 2 consecutive times already... my laptop has hanged during start-up.

First is a Toshiba welcome screen which should be followed by the Windows welcome screen.

But in this case (twice in a row), it has just stopped during the Toshiba welcome screen without proceeding to the Windows welcome screen.

However, if I shut it off and try to start again (for a second try), it starts without any problem.

Are these signs of a dying notebook? I've had it for exactly 2 and 1/2 years.

It's still under warranty, but I'd rather not bring it to the shop if I can help it; as I don't trust the service technicians with the private info on the laptop.

I've used CCleaner and scanned for issues in the Registry as well, but the laptop seems to be alright according to the scan. It has a genuine Windows Vista OS

Any suggestions?

.

Edited March 7, 2010 by junkofdavid2

[DragonQuest]

time for a new laptop buddy lol

[RKASA]

Not the whole notebook but sounds like it could be the HHD is getting bad. Not that expensive to replace. Back up your data now.

[Carib]

Whatever it is, whatever you do.......... Make a backup first !

[BWPattaya]

My Toshiba, about the same age, is telling me I need a new RTC (Real Time Clock) battery so it won't start without a bit of persuasion. Once started I have to reset the time/date.

I only trust two people to do anything with my computers. Me and one Thai guy on Soi Chaiyaprock.

You certainly don't need to think it has died and needs replacing. The worst case scenario is probably reinstalling your operating system. Copy all the data you want to save first though.

[manarak]

The symptoms you described generally hint at a problem with the motherboard, but it can really be anything, even a faulty RAM bank.

BUT: I've had a similar problem 3 times in the last couple of years, and everytime the motherboard died within a few months.

Recently made Laptops (anything after the year 2000) are crap.

Most of them die within 5 years.

You wrote it is still under warranty, so by all means use the warranty.

Before all, make a backup of your data (external HDD is best).

When you bring it back to the shop, insist on removing your hard disk, so that you won't give them your personal data.

When getting it back, insist you will take it only if it boots five times in a row on the first try.

Edited March 7, 2010 by manarak

[mic6ard]

2.5 years with a laptop Impressive. I tried to change mine every year, as I travel a lot and it as my main access for work and i'net. not though I'm base at home so no need for travelling.

Laptops are notoriously hard to fix due to their intergrated boards. So good luck,, but my choice is to get a new one.

Maybe a little partial here, but the leopard OS is still way friendlier than WIN7. Just to clarify, I use mac at home, but at work I'm force to use window.

[junkofdavid2]

It's constantly backed-up with my Seagate automatic back-up and automatic sync (I do both on separate folders), so thank god I'm not "terrified" at the thought of it crashing with all the data.

Thanks to Manarak for the advise to get the hard-drive if I check it in for repair... I never knew it was possible to do that.

[richardt1808]

Thanks to Manarak for the advise to get the hard-drive if I check it in for repair... I never knew it was possible to do that.

duh... if you remove the hard drive, how the heck is the shop going to be able to boot your laptop to test it ???

Come on guys, if you are going to give advice, at least let it be practical !

[longball53098]

If I read the Op correctly he said it hangs during the initial startup and POST of the computer. Not during loading of the OS. Most likely some basic hardware issue like the HD. Needs to take to a shop for them to run a complete diag of the hardware.

[TigertheCat]

A program named SpinRite by Gibson Research can do a very thorough,and lengthy,scan of your hard drive.This will pinpoint and repair any suspect areas although ,if it finds any you had better get a new one anyway.

[cdnvic]

A program named SpinRite by Gibson Research can do a very thorough,and lengthy,scan of your hard drive.This will pinpoint and repair any suspect areas although ,if it finds any you had better get a new one anyway.

Superb program. Money well spent.

[junkofdavid2]

Started up well today... let's see how it goes.

Actually I'm beginning to think similar things happened in the distant past, from time to time, during periods that I was transporting my laptop a lot, but it got 'fixed by itself' as I eventually transported it less again.

(Yes, I try to be careful and not bang it around in my bag.)

I've again been transporting my laptop a lot recently; because of outside projects.

Does that have an effect?

[RKASA]

Anything with moving parts ware out. The drive may have a hard start from time to time. It will only get worse with time.

[lopburi3]

Do you have an external HD connected via USB? My Acer often will not boot Windows 7 until I remove the USB plug with the extra HD. Boots 100% when removed.

[junkofdavid2]

Do you have an external HD connected via USB? My Acer often will not boot Windows 7 until I remove the USB plug with the extra HD. Boots 100% when removed.

That could be it!

It's only recently that I bought an external hard drive connected via USB!

Thanks, will try.

[powderpuff]

Consider upgrading the BIOS to the latest version. To be done by a shop.

But I'm sure it's the external USB drive problem.

Edited March 8, 2010 by powderpuff

[cdnvic]

Might just be a matter of changing the boot order from the boot menu (F12 usually). Remove that USB port or place it after the hard drive.

[Robbogeordie]

Mine also doesn't boot with the external HD connected on laptop and computer.Starts fine without.

[welo]

A program named SpinRite by Gibson Research can do a very thorough,and lengthy,scan of your hard drive.This will pinpoint and repair any suspect areas although ,if it finds any you had better get a new one anyway.

Superb program. Money well spent.

This Voodoo Magic software from the last century would not be my first choice to tackle the problem

SpinRite's techniques and claims are questioned by some, though I still need to find a review by a respectable hardware site with a statement on that issue. SpinRite is also criticized for writing to the same harddisk when recovering data, which should be avoided if the harddisk is in the process of failing. Doing intensive disk operation as done by SpinRite (and other recovery tools) might also push the harddrive over the limit and have it fail comletely. The website is kind of old, unprofessional and weird, too.

If you don't have data to recover and/or the drive is still accessible I recommend using other software to determine the state of the harddisk - before getting the 'big guns'.

Namely

1. Listen for acoustic signs of a failing harddrive
   
2. Check the S.M.A.R.T. attributes
   
3. Run a disk surface test
   

To hear acoustic signs of a failure you'll have to get your ear close to the harddisk. Laptop drives are often very quiet and noises difficult or even impossible to hear.

HDTune reads SMART attributes and includes a surface scan under the 'Error Scan' tab. Either try the 15-day trial Pro version or the feature limited free version.

All harddisk manufacturers provide free diagnostic tools. Here is a very complete list: http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

Btw modern harddisks have self-healing capabilities, bad blocks will be marked as such and mapped to spare sectors that are reserved for exactly this purpose. (Interestingly this only happens not until the OS tries to WRITE to those sectors). Check the SMART attributes for a sign of a failing harddrive. Wikipedia offers a list of critical attributes and how to interpret them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Kn...R.T._attributes

Report back with the results.

Remarks:

• An alternative to SpinRite is HDD Regenerator (payware), which is included on Hiren's Boot CD (*cough*).
  
• Most manufacturers will only replace a harddisk under warranty if their own diagnostic tool reports a 'failing' harddisk. A small number of bad blocks will not get your harddrive replaced since they can be re-mapped to those mentioned reserved backup sectors. However, not sure about policies in Thailand since warranty is often provided by service centers like Synnex or DCOM, not by the manufacturer directly.
  

welo

[cdnvic]

Steve Gibson won't win any awards for website design, but in the computer security world his reputation is steller, and so is Spinrite's. The link you cite as evidence to the contrary is an anonymous forum post by someone who's drive had been failing already. Hardly solid information.

If you are going to give advice responsibly, without needlessly slandering someone's product, you should cite credible sources. I've been using Spinrite both at work and home for five years, and it's brought many disks back to life that normally would have been trashed. No, it can't save them all, but I have never found a product that does the job better, and I look frequently.

[SantiSuk]

2.5 years with a laptop Impressive. I tried to change mine every year, as I travel a lot and it as my main access for work and i'net. not though I'm base at home so no need for travelling.

Laptops are notoriously hard to fix due to their intergrated boards. So good luck,, but my choice is to get a new one.

Maybe a little partial here, but the leopard OS is still way friendlier than WIN7. Just to clarify, I use mac at home, but at work I'm force to use window.

Seems a bit excessive.

The company I worked with before retiring was the biggest accounting consulting firm and had thousands of employees travelling the world. They used Thinkpads (IBM now Lenovo); changed them every 3 years. Expensive but very reliable - I have traveled heavily for ten years with occasional drops and bangs. My current Lenovo Think Pad X60s is well into its 4th year and still going strong. They are a bit slow, but they don't seem to break down.

You get what you pay for, so don't expect your budget laptop to give the same service.

[teletiger]

My PC with XP sp3 won't boot with the edge data card attached, yet my laptop with the same OS will.

Regards.

[junkofdavid2]

Update...

Seems to be booting fine since I removed the external HD...

[welo]

Steve Gibson won't win any awards for website design, but in the computer security world his reputation is steller, and so is Spinrite's. The link you cite as evidence to the contrary is an anonymous forum post by someone who's drive had been failing already. Hardly solid information.

If you are going to give advice responsibly, without needlessly slandering someone's product, you should cite credible sources. I've been using Spinrite both at work and home for five years, and it's brought many disks back to life that normally would have been trashed. No, it can't save them all, but I have never found a product that does the job better, and I look frequently.

I don't want to start a flame-war here, especially since I didn't come to a conclusion yet what to think of this program. And since you seem to have a lot of experience with this program, and I remember you as a knowledgeable person from your other posts, I would very much like to discuss this a bit further, also on a (mildly) technical level. If you'd like to do that we should start a new topic in order not to hijack this thread here.

What I do want to discuss here is that my intention was not to bash the program (sorry for the opening liner about voodoo and last century, was meant as a joke, hence the smiley), but to merely point out[/b]

1. that this program is being questioned by some. The criticism made it into wikipedia, which - as we all know - might not mean too much. In such cases I like to read the associated discussion page. I just noticed now that I didn't post the wikipedia link at all.

Read my post again and you will see that I didn't hide the fact that I didn't find any solid/professional article on SpinRite (either pro or against). The link I posted was NOT meant as proof against SpinRite, but to warn against the problem of stressing hard-drives that are on the verge of failing. I actually pointed out that this applies to other tools as well.

My comment on the website was basically an effort to sum up some unusual aspects on the marketing of the program, namely that both website and program are not actively maintained and pretty old - last release announced was June 2004.

2. that I don't recommend the tool for the OP's problem at this point since there is no data to recover and extensive hard-disk manipulation might actually worsen the problem. Furthermore there are free alternatives that can check whether the hard-drive has any problem in the first place before getting the big (and expensive) guns.

I hope I could demonstrate that I didn't try to bash and flame a well-established product because I dislike it (or for whatever personal reasons), but because there are reasonable enough voices of criticism that make a warning justifiable.

Again, I agree that the lack of citations is irritating, sorry for that, but I did actually try to find articles during my research, and also found quite a view pro and against, but neither of them technically well-enough founded to make it worthy posting.

Like I said, recommend moving a more detailed and technical discussion to a new topic, because it will surely take some time to come to a conclusion. We can link to it for anybody who is interested following up.

welo

[welo]

Well, I just noticed that the OP's problem has been fixed, so we might as well keep discussing here... well, later today then

welo

[Eureka]

Thanks to Manarak for the advise to get the hard-drive if I check it in for repair... I never knew it was possible to do that.

duh... if you remove the hard drive, how the heck is the shop going to be able to boot your laptop to test it ???

Come on guys, if you are going to give advice, at least let it be practical !

DUH..... the computer does not need a hard disk to complete the Boot Strap process. This process originates prior to the use of hard disks.

You cannot start the operating system installed without it, with some excemptions such as LiveCDs, but this is a valid system diagnostic tool to verify if the Hard Disk is the likely problem. If the computer passes the POST test without fail when the hard drive is removed but fails when reinstalled then the POST cannot effectively see the drive.

If the shop say they need the hard drive to complete the Boot Strap they are wrong.

[welo]

One thing this discussion demonstrates for sure is how much easier it would be if one could actually see the user's setup when troubleshooting. I mean seeing that external USB harddisk connected to the PC, then the PC getting stuck during POST...

Kudos to Lopburi for thinking of that possibility!!

welo

[welo]

On the matter of Steve Gibson and SpinRite.

After doing (even) more research on the topic I find the following criticism appearing in multiple sources:

1. technical criticism of SpinRite (but certainly not to the extent that it is a bad or non-working product, but that it's use might be dangerous in certain scenarios)
   
2. criticism of marketing claims about features of the product and accomplished results of using SpinRite, and in general of the language used to promote and describe the product ('pseudo science'). Those points are usually attributed to the person of Steve Gibson directly since they were not only published on the website but also repeated by him on other occasions.
   
3. criticism of Steve Gibson accusations against Microsoft that a bug in the Windows Metafile Format handling code was deliberately included to provide a backdoor into a Windows system
   

Details, sources and quotes:

1.

From what I understand SpinRite has two features that stand out: First it tries to recover data very thoroughly (re-reading a sector up to 1000 times), then writing it to another block on the same harddisk, secondly it rewrites every sector on the harddisk in a certain pattern to 'refresh' the harddrive.

The first is disputed since it might stress a failing harddrive too much and push it over the point where it fails completely. Furthermore writing the recovered data back to the failing harddisk might cause further issues.

The latter is criticized for two reasons: First it can lure a user into believing that it is safe to keep using a defective harddisk whereas sometimes bad blocks are signs of worse to come and the harddisk fails soon after.

Secondly the effect of the specific pattern and the magnetic effect of this procedure is doubted. OK, I'll give up on this one. Didn't find solid articles to back this up.

Btw any write operation to a bad block will trigger the harddisk's builtin feature of re-mapping the sector to a good spare sector that is reserved for exactly this purpose (reference).

When it encounters a block which is hard to read, it repeatedly attempts to re-read it, and tries to determine the value of each byte. The data is then saved onto the same disk (after re-allocating the physical block) which is a potentially risky operation if the disk write head is not operating properly. The goal of SpinRite is to get the hard drive working as reliably as possible, for future use, in addition to recovering as much data as possible. In situations where data recovery is the over-riding goal, other tools that passively attempt to recover data and copy it elsewhere might be better.

source: http://en.allexperts.com/e/s/sp/spinrite.htm

Spinrite is not data recovery software.

I get many questions about why I left off Spinrite on my recommendations of recovery software. I specifically leave off Spinrite because under the strictest terms it is not data recovery software. Almost every single data recovery package knows, and will warn you not to write the data back to the original source drive. Data Recovery/Forensics software almost always recover from a source to a destination. Spinrite does not do that, it refreshes the surface and controls reads to get the maximum amount of data from the sectors and then puts it back down on the same drive.

[...]

Another horrific story I have seen with drives sent to me, is that if Spinrite it runs successfully, people are under the impression that the drive is repaired and is usable again and continue to use it. Big mistake and it usually dies again shortly.

source: http://www.myharddrivedied.com/weblog/why_...ot_on_my_d.html

Readings on the 'refreshing' topic

http://library.thinkquest.org/C006208/data...harddrives4.php

http://www.smarthdd.com/en/bad_block.htm

http://serverfault.com/questions/51851/doe...val-deteriorate

http://library.thinkquest.org/C006208/data...harddrives4.php

2.

Note: this comment is from 2000, the website has changed in the meantime.

I suggest that those with a technical bent visit the SpinRite website and

see they can swallow such things as:

* "prevents mass storage systems from crashing" (nothing can do that)

* "sophisticated magnetodynamic physics models" (pseudo science)

* "weakest possible magnetic signals" (not real)

* "we doubt whether anyone but Steve and a handful of aliens would even

know what all this is" (no argument there)

* "Weak Bits" (no such thing)

* "gradual evolution of the drive's storage surfaces through physical and

magnetic stresses" (mumbo jumbo)

* "SpinRite is actually able to lower the amplification of the drive's

internal read-amplifier" (impossible, and after all this time Steve

apparently still does not know that data is recorded on magnetic disks

with flux reversals, not "amplitude")

* "mass storage systems need periodic preventive maintenance" (nonsense)

* "yeah, we know, Steve's a magician with his code" (how modest)

As for all the "exclusive" SpinRite features, many if not all of them are

anything but exclusive; for example, testing disk surfaces with worst-case

data patterns goes back many years before Steve ever thought of SpinRite.

source: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.dcom.x...mp;dmode=source

TBH, the author John Navas does not seem to be free from self-marketing either..

I dare say the person Steve Gibson is at least controversial. Also checkout the (now offline) website grcsucks.com via the wayback engine, the wikipedia article on his person and the associated discussion page.

3.

During one episode of his Security Now! podcast he accused Microsoft of having inentionally introduced a backdoor into a Windows component handling the Windows Metafile Format. Gibson apologized later and modified his statement, though did not completely revoke it.

Unfortunately I didn't find any technically profound article that would provide a conclusion on this issue.

Windows Metafile vulnerability claims

In episode 22 of Security Now! in January 2006, Steve Gibson made an accusation[9] that Microsoft may have intentionally put a backdoor into the Windows Metafile processing code of the Windows 2000 and XP operating systems.

Gibson claimed that while reverse engineering the Windows Metafile format, he could only run arbitrary code if he used a "nonsensical" value in the metafile. His conclusion was that Microsoft had intentionally designed Windows in this way to allow them to use the feature as a backdoor to running code on Windows computers without the knowledge of the user.

Gibson's claim was refuted[10] by Stephen Toulouse of Microsoft in an MSDN blog posting on 13 January 2006, stating that Gibson's observations applied only to metafiles containing one data record, and that the behavior was not intentional. Gibson then apologized for the mistake, but held that the author of that bit of code intended that "feature" to be there, but that that bit of code was not necessarily meant to be in Windows.

Further information: Windows Metafile vulnerability and Transcript of episode 22 of Security Now!

source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Now!#Windows_Metafile_vulnerability_claims

welo

Edited March 9, 2010 by welo

[junkofdavid2]

Another update:

It seemed to happen again this morning, and kinda froze during startup... then I realized that my COOLING PAD FAN was plugged into a USB drive. Pulled out the cooling fan plug from the USB drive and then the laptop suddenly "revived" and continued the startup booting.

It could have been the cooling pad instead of the external HD, or both. However, I've had this cooling pad for a while but that didn't happen in the past.