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From: Barry Watzman on 15 Apr 2008 22:31
You can buy hard drives on E-Bay for about $1 per gigabyte. All you
need for testing is a 10-20GB drive (in fact, you could even get by with
a drive as small as 6GB for testing). Just be careful to get a drive
that is stated as "tested, good" AND has a warranty ... on E-Bay,
"untested" usually means "it's defective, but we are not going to come
right out and say that". Still, as I said, you can usually buy [good]
drives for about $1 per gigabyte.

PS -- get a copy of DFT (drive fitness test) from the Hitachi disk drive
web site. Use it to test all drives that you get. It will run a
superficial but very useful test on ANY drive. On IBM/Hitachi drives
only, it can do much more extensive diagnostics and repair, including a
true low-level format. It normally boots from a floppy disk that the
program makes. If you need a CD, you can use that floppy as the "image"
to make a bootable CD.

Also, while this model probably is an IDE drive, don't just
automatically assume that, it COULD be an SATA drive.



haligonab wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Apologies for my ignorance. I've been building my own desktops for 10
> years, but I've been told that laptops are different beasts.
>
> I just inherited a 5-year-old Toshiba A15-S127 from a friend. It
> appears that the hard drive (original Toshiba) has given up the ghost.
> When we booted it up, it ran a full scandisk (to my friend's surprise)
> and corrected all errors and ran flawlessly for 3 hours. When we
> rebooted it couldn't access the hard drive. He said his son had
> dropped it more than once. I assume that the HD has been damaged, as
> it displayed new errors when scandisk ran again. And again. Then I got
> the "a disk read error has occurred" message over and over. Now all I
> get is the Toshiba splash screen and a blinking cursor followed by a
> blank screen. Hmm... now the "a disk read error has occurred" message
> is back.
>
> BTW, I tried booting from an XP install disk. I got it to boot once
> but it crashed during the system scan. Now it won't boot at all.
> That's got me wondering if the IDE connector on the board could be
> damaged? I can hear both the HDD and combo drives spin up.
>
> I'd rather not throw money at this if it seems to be a mobo problem,
> but I wouldn't mind investing in a new hard drive. Any thoughts you
> folks might offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
>
> Steve
From: Barry Watzman on 15 Apr 2008 22:33
Believe me, there is good reason to fix it. People routinely pay well
over a hundred dollars (sometimes over $200) on E-Bay for laptops
significantly older than that one, as long as they are complete and working.

Dave wrote:

>
> Given the cost of laptops now, is there really a lot of point paying for
> a new hard disk to put in a 5-year old laptop. Chances are the batteries
> are not going to last long.
From: Richard Carpenter on 15 Apr 2008 22:37
"haligonab" <stevieb(a)SPAMNOTiglou.com> wrote in message
news:pgl904pt40m417q7se3oi78d2cav06dk3e(a)4ax.com...
> On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:06:05 +0100, Dave <foo(a)coo.com> wrote:
>
>>haligonab wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Apologies for my ignorance. I've been building my own desktops for 10
>>> years, but I've been told that laptops are different beasts.
>>>
>>> I just inherited a 5-year-old Toshiba A15-S127 from a friend. It
>>
>><snip>
>>
>>> I'd rather not throw money at this if it seems to be a mobo problem,
>>> but I wouldn't mind investing in a new hard drive.
>>
>>Given the cost of laptops now, is there really a lot of point paying for
>>a new hard disk to put in a 5-year old laptop. Chances are the batteries
>> are not going to last long.
>
>
> Hi Dave,
>
> Thanks for looking. I appreciate your thoughts, however, I'm not
> looking for a new laptop. I don't really need one. This is just a
> project and a learning experience. And the battery was replaced before
> I got it. I'm just trying to pick the collective brain to see if my
> assumption is reasonable. Thanks again for looking.
>

Sounds like it's very likely just as you guessed - a failing or damaged hard
drive. Just double-check that it is seated firmly to rule out a loose
connection. I'd check eBay for a reasonable replacement drive. You might be
able to find one used very cheap.

--
Richard Carpenter

From: Barry Watzman on 15 Apr 2008 22:36
Please clarify that "it" refers to the laptop and not to the hard drive!!

Woody wrote:
> Since it was dropped you need to disassemble it and check that all
> connectors are plugged securely...
>
>
> "haligonab" <stevieb(a)SPAMNOTiglou.com> wrote in message
> news:pgl904pt40m417q7se3oi78d2cav06dk3e(a)4ax.com...
>> On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:06:05 +0100, Dave <foo(a)coo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> haligonab wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> Apologies for my ignorance. I've been building my own desktops for 10
>>>> years, but I've been told that laptops are different beasts.
>>>>
>>>> I just inherited a 5-year-old Toshiba A15-S127 from a friend. It
>>> <snip>
>>>
>>>> I'd rather not throw money at this if it seems to be a mobo problem,
>>>> but I wouldn't mind investing in a new hard drive.
>>> Given the cost of laptops now, is there really a lot of point paying for
>>> a new hard disk to put in a 5-year old laptop. Chances are the batteries
>>> are not going to last long.
>>
>> Hi Dave,
>>
>> Thanks for looking. I appreciate your thoughts, however, I'm not
>> looking for a new laptop. I don't really need one. This is just a
>> project and a learning experience. And the battery was replaced before
>> I got it. I'm just trying to pick the collective brain to see if my
>> assumption is reasonable. Thanks again for looking.
>>
>> Steve
>>
>>
>
>
From: deportu on 16 Apr 2008 08:13

Well, it's simple. Remove the hard drive from the laptop and boot. See
if it reaches the BIOS properly. If possible, try using a Live CD from a
Linux distro such as Ubuntu when booting (boot from CD, of course). That
should pretty much show you everything is working properly.

Then just buy a hard drive and plug that baby in. :)


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