Not recognised, Freezing and Crashing HD

Question

I posted earlier under 'Blue Screen - Hard Disk Problem?'  during which the DELL diagnostics identified a bad block on my hard disk and I was advised on here I would need a replacement hard disk as a result.  I have ordered a new hard disk from DELL UK but on the offchance I rang Hitachi to ask if my 'bad' HD was still under warranty.  They told me that on their web site www.hgst.com was a utility to health check the HD and may even be able to repair the bad block.  I downloaded the tool and it erased the bad block.  Now when I run the Dell Diagnostics and the Hitachi health check the Hard Disk is coming up clean.  The DELL Diagnostics comes up with passes on the full system check too. The bad news is that (still) on boot up sometimes does not recognise the HD.  Other times it will boot up but will temporarily freeze after some use and eventually instead of the blue screen I used to get it just shuts down.  This troublesome HD is a 30GB IBM Travelstar and is running Windows 2000.  I also have my original Dell HD - a 10GB Hitachi running Windows Me - which I can boot up off and run everything no problem which leads me to believe that it is not a hardware problem (unless it's the HD itself). I was wondering if it could be that some Windows 2000 files have got corrupt or if it could still be a hard disk problem.  Or could it be BIOS related?  I have BIOS A12 which I have not touched recently.  If it could be a software problem is there anything I can do apart from reformatting the drive and reinstalling everything?  I don't really want to format the troublesome hard disk just yet as I have my 40GB media bay drive coming tomorrow and I intend to put the new 40GB HD in the caddy and the old troublesome 30GB HD in the Media Bay in the hope that I can transfer data across to the new drive. As an aside I order an Inspiron 8200 40GB Media Bay Kit from DELL UK.  Will this work on an Inspiron 8000 in the manner described above (i.e. put the new 40GB in my existing caddy and the old 30GB in the new Media Bay)?  I would have ordered an Ispiron 8000 media bay kit but there wasn't one listed on the UK web site and I believe the 8200 kit to be compatible with the 8000.

DELL-Corey · Answer

mark_p, Thank you for using Dell's Community Forum. I think the steps listed in the 'Hard Drive not Found FAQ' would be applicable to your situation.

mark_p · Answer

I have spent the best part of a week trying everything including your checklist :

Firstly, this issue could possibly just be a loose hard drive, and so reseating it should rectify the issue. If the drive continues to repeatedly come loose though, the problem is most likely the connector on the motherboard.

Don't think it can be this as I have swapped the 10GB for the 30GB drive caddies around and the 30GB still fails.

The issue could also be caused by an intermittently working/not-working optical drive. If the optical drive starts to malfunction, it can cause the HDD not to be seen.

Don't think it can be this as I have run the DELL Diagnostics and everything reports to be okay.

As a test, you can try booting without the optical drive in the system and see if you can get the error to occur (without the optical drive in the computer). If the problem doesn’t occur, the issue is very likely the optical drive.

Why would the 10GB disk work and the 30GB one not?

Additionally this issue can in some cases some cases, be caused by misaligned bottom-plastics.

I'm not sure what a bottom plastic is but again why does the 10GB hard disk work and the 30GB one not?

So from the checklist it just leaves ringing DELL...

What about the Media bay for the 8200 working in the 8000? Will it or not? Thanks.

johnallg · Answer

All C-series media bay devices work in other C-series notebooks.  Yes it will work.

Infinite_Trial · Answer

mark_p, usually when everything is reported ok in diags, it could be a corrupted software. have you tried reinstallaing 2000?

Storage, Drives & Media

Was this post helpful?