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Help! e1505 laptop running really slow; disk spinning a lot; "XLDR: ATA Error" on reboot
Hi --
Am hoping someone can help: my 18 month-old laptop (e1505, XP MC SP2, Centrino Duo 1.83 MHz, 1 GB RAM), has started running really, really slowly under certain circumstances: rebooting can literally take 20 minutes, switching applications or starting new apps takes forever.
I've noticed a couple of things:
1. While it's sitting there being slow, it looks like the hard disk is spinning an awful lot without anything noticeable happening
2. Sometimes it's almost like there's a delay (e.g., when launching a new app) before it starts accessing the disk
3. A few months ago, I would occasionally get an "XLDR: ATA error" on reboot (e.g., after Windows update), or worse, the dreaded blue screen. Knock on wood, that stopped happening, and I've never figured out what the problem is.
I've run all the diagnostics I can find and everything checks out fine. Any ideas? I've searched online about the "ATA error", and it appears that running fixmbr off the recovery console is the way to fix that. Given that I'm not longer having this problem (not to mention that I've never tried to use the recovery console), I'm a bit chicken to try it. Could a faulty master boot record result in this kind of behavior? I've tried Dell tech support, and the main thing they recommend is backing everything up and formatting the disk and starting over, which I'd like to avoid if possible.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
dg1261
623 Posts
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August 6th, 2008 19:00
The screen message, "XLDR: ATA error", is unique to Dell, so you're not likely to find much about it through an online search. It's built into the extended MBR (LBA Sector 3) that's part of a Dell factory MediaDirect 2 installation. The screen message is generated in response to a disk controller error.
The symptoms have all the earmarks of a failing hard disk, so the first thing to try is to visit the website of the manufacturer of your hard disk, download their diagnostic utility, and let that have a run at your disk. There's also a chance it's a bad data cable, so you could try replacing that, but given the symptoms a failing hard disk seems more likely.
Reinstalling won't help if it's a hardware problem.
And finally, "fixmbr" won't fix the problem, all it will do is suppress the error message. A Microsoft MBR (which is what "fixmbr" will give you) is simply uncommunicative and doesn't tell you what's wrong. A Dell MBR is a little more helpful and at least tell's you it's having a problem with the hardware, not with the MBR or bootsectors.
Dan Goodell
Inside the Dell PC Restore Partition
wwtma_f757cf
6 Posts
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August 24th, 2008 14:00
Thanks very much for the help -- greatly appreciated. Am hoping for some further help/suggestions: I figured out that the HD is a Seagate drive, downloaded the diagnostics (SeaTools) and tried to run them. The drive passed the short diagnostics fine, but when running the longer diagnostics, I got a "Kernel Data Inpage Error", and then when I restarted, the Windows Error Reporting page that came up was:
So, based on the prior post, it sounds like either the drive itself is going, or perhaps the a bad data cable.
My questions:
Thanks so much!