Inspiron 600m Hard Drives!!

Hi,

We have strayed a little, I was using the car thing to make a point. The Diags are a guide, but can lead to wrong conclusions. For example, a modem may be taken out by a lightening strike, and not see the line ( or dial tone ). The Diags say it is working, because the hardware can still see the modem. Back to the " factor X " , if you are in a remote area the local courier may be a bit rough and throwing around the HDD's. Also if you are rough handling it when going, the HDD wont like it. You can be unlucky to a point, but after that you will have to look further. Dont forget, when you place a call you are normally talking to people reading from a screen, so a bad HDD is that. Send another. Only if you get someone a bit smarter, or complain and go further up they will then look further. If you ask, they may check and then do what you ask for. ( all IMO )

                                                                         Regards Chris

I also had HDD problems with my Inspiron 510m. After few months, the HDD become very slow and doing strange noises. Dell replaced it without problem. Again, I have exactly the same symptom and I have to replace the disk now by myself (the guarantee period is finished). I don’t want to replace it with the same disk.

Can I replace it with any EIDE 2.5” HDD ? Which one do you recommend?

Thanks for any help.

Poloox,

In a new machine you are able to use almost any.( older machines may have issues with much larger than they came with ) I would think about speed, size, price and warranty.

                                                                         Regards Chris

Hi to all,

Poloox seems to have the same experience as I have.
Also an Inspiron 510M.
The only difference is that he is up for the third disk, while I am replacing for the fifth one.

Since all the support desk people are doing scripts, the disks are replaced almost without asking questions.

Now five disks in two years is not normal.
I do not live in the bush where the postman has to travel for hours or days to reach my mailbox.
The 510m is not carried around a lot (but does work long hours every day)

So what can be the cause (suppose the disks are OK)? What can go wrong on the motherboard?
- too high temperature in the enclosure?
- error in diskcontroller?
- error in powersupply?
- design error in 510M?

The bootom line is that statistics show that a sixth disk will be my share, if I don't do a thing.
And the script-readers a Dell-support just say "bad luck". After two years they surely will not accept reponsability and exchange i.e. the motherboard.

So any ideas?

best regards,

Goos

Sorry: an addition

All the drives fail because of the same reason:

- the disk is not recognized by the 510M BIOS

After conneting the 2,5" disk to a normal PC though a conversion-connector and a normal flatcable (40 or 80), the ASUS-BIOS does not recognize the disk as well.

Hitachi and Samsung tools started from bootdisks gave the same result.

best regards,

Goos