Hard drive error code 0146 despite replacing HDD

Question

Hello,

I am trying to fix my wife's Dell Inspiron 1520.

It began not booting into windows vista, I ran a diagnostic and it came with errors saying hard drive was malfunctioning. I tried to repair vista, system restore and the recovery but it was no use, as it got to the point that the computer couldn't access HD to even start these utilities.

I bought a replacement hard drive from New Egg, a 750 Gb 7500rpm Western Digital black. I put installed it and then used clonezilla to clone the old one by having it hooked into a USB into the laptop with an adapter on the old hard drive. It cloned but with errors. I could not boot off the new one cloned, not could i repair windows OS with the Dell windows vista CD. It was would start the installation and then cancel itself due to errors with now specific error codes nor reasons.

Next, i did a quick format of the new drive and erased whatever partitions were on there. Again, I tried to install the Dell windows vista 7 CD and it got hung and cancelled itself again.

I have read many many many forums, and found that Dell may have something hidden in those partitions not allowing it to install. So i have a Windows 7 64 bit CD, also with a Dell making on it, that was bought off ebay, and that i had used to install Windows 7 on my home built desktop.

Windows 7 installed and seems to be running OK but with an ominous warning when windows starts that my hard drive is about to fail. This is the brand new one.

I run the western digital diagnostic software and get "status code= 04 (unkown failed test element) and failure checkpoint= 96 (unkown test)

I run the Dell diagnostics at boot up, the "Dell Pre-Boot System Assessment Build 4106" and get error code 0146 error code 2000-0146

I am at my wits end here, what is wrong and how do i fix it?

Also, I imagine her laptop (has 2 GB RAM) would run in 32bit but the 64bit windows 7 installed and runs on it with out complaining about it so far.

Signed,

Very very frustrated Husband.

ejn63 · Answer

Remove the battery and unplug the system.  Hold the power button for 30 seconds.  See if that clears the BIOS event log.  If not, go into the BIOS setup and see if there's a reset option there.

ejn63 · Answer

The old one was probably an old-age failure - notebook drives last 3-5 years -- closer to 3 than 5 these days for many of them.  If the replacement for the replacement fails, there could be something wrong with the system -- if it's trouble-free just chalk it up to infant mortality on the replacement drive.

ejn63 · Answer

I missed the part about the WD error - it sounds like the replacement drive is faulty as well. It's not common, but a certain percentage of new drives arrives faulty out of the box.

Have WD (or the reseller you purchased from) replace the drive under warranty.

HDDprob · Answer

Ejn63

I did Remove the battery and unplug the system and old the power button for 30 seconds. No change in error codes or in the Western Digital utility. I did not have a BIOS reset, but did revert them back to original defaults, which did nothing either.

Thanks for the suggestion. Any idea what is going on here?

HDDprob · Answer

OK, I have filed an online request for replacement with New Egg, and will see what happens.  In the meantime, would there be any other reason for the old drive to fail and the new one get error messages?

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Hard drive error code 0146 despite replacing HDD

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