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Dying Hard Drive or Optical Drive?

Started by Carskick, October 02, 2006, 00:41 hrs

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Carskick

My uncle gave me a friends laptop that had many software issues, along with it's included disks, and wanted me to clean it up or just reformat it.

So first I tried cleaning it up the standard way, preventing programs from opening with windows, deleting AOL and several of the freeware and spyware programs which can cause issue, and other stuff like that. This thing was slow at first, taking 10-15minutes to completely boot, and it is an HP zd7030us, which has a 3.06Ghz P4, 512 RAM, and a Go5600, so it is still a good machine. The machine also had a norton package I wanted to get rid of. Mistake. Norton go back was on it, and uninstalling the package made goback want to uninstall, too. So upon reboot, goback begins to uninstall, taking about 4 hours to completely uninstall (It basically redid the entire hard drive), and then windows would blue screen upon reboot. Safe mode kind of worked with explorer.exe crashing on occassion. I tried turning off all startup programs and non-MS services, still no boot. I tried doing a windows repair, still no boot. So I decided to reformat. The whole process went fine. MCE2004 was up and running, I installed the drivers, but it was only SP1, so I put on SP2, then AVG, and anti-spyware. Of course, it restarted several times. After puting several downloads on, installing, then deleting source files, I decided to defrag to make it in an optimal state. However, it seemed to stop defraging at 55% on compacting files, though the comptuer still was running. So I stopped the defrag and restarted.

After a restart, there was no longer an optical drive listed under my computer, only the C:, no D:, although there had been before. Stuck in a disk, it spun, but did nothing else. I restarted again, then it stayed extra long on the BIOS screen, then SMART reported Hard Drive 2 slave was dying and they reccommended back up and replacement. It  will then go into windows, but if I try to boot off of a CD, it will give an error message before saying press any key to boot from CD.

I used speedfan to run a SMART test, and the fitness test for the hard drive was 40%, and performance 95%. Still no optical.

Is it the optical drive that died or the hard drive. The defrag issue points to hard drive, the error message and lack of optical point to a bad optical drive. What is wrong here?

I am running chkdisk as we speak, as speedfan reported some screwed up sectors on the hard drive. The BIOS has no inormation on SMART or drives, so it is completely useless.

Thanks!
Athlon64 X2 3800+ Machester@2.45Ghz, 4x1GB A-DATA PC3200@204(2.5-3-3-6), XFX 8800GT, ASUS A8N5X NF4, Antec 300 case, Antec EarthWatts 650w, 640GB 16MB and 200GB 8MB 7200RPM SATA WD HDDs, NEC3540, NEC3550, Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate<br />Photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/Carskick

Carskick

It must be the optical drive because if I press ESC on boot up, it shows some of the POST, and it show Fixed Drive 0 and Fixed Drive 1. Fixed Drive 0 is detected immediately as the hard drive, while it hangs on Fixed Drive 1, never detecting the optical drive as it should. Will any optical drive work in this machine, or does it need a propriatory one?
Athlon64 X2 3800+ Machester@2.45Ghz, 4x1GB A-DATA PC3200@204(2.5-3-3-6), XFX 8800GT, ASUS A8N5X NF4, Antec 300 case, Antec EarthWatts 650w, 640GB 16MB and 200GB 8MB 7200RPM SATA WD HDDs, NEC3540, NEC3550, Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate<br />Photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/Carskick