Inspiron 6000 - replaced hard drive now get blue screen of death

Question

A hard drive failed on a customers laptop, I replaced the drive with a Hitachi 120GB IDE unit and all was well, managed to install windows fine. However a day later a few blue screens appeared and then the laptop would not boot up as it would found no hard drive. Turning the power off for a couple of minutes then cures this problem until the next blue screen of death.   The windows event viewer points says disk failure error code 11. I have used the Hitachi hard drive test program and it finds no errors with the drive itself, it also passes motherboard/IDE interface tests on the Dell diagnostics program.   The original drive had seek/write errors.   My question is this a known issue and is there a cure? Is the hard drive controller just wrecked?

joydivision82 · Answer

OK my mistake the drive is actually a 160gb unit.

I have ran the fitness test and it worked perfectly it ran for a long time and found no errors.

I have since read on this forum the laptop can only support a 120gb unit and I have put a 160gb unit it. However if the BIOS was not compatable it would not even regconise it would it?

I used the ultimate boot CD to run the Hitachi program :).

I am a confident engineer but rarely repair laptops and I think this has caught me out.

Message Edited by joydivision82 on 06-25-2008 05:11 PM

ejn63 · Answer

Try running the Hitachi DFT (drive fitness test)  -- download from Hitachi and prepare a boot CD.

ejn63 · Answer

What does the BIOS read for the size of the drive?

joydivision82 · Answer

137gb from memory.

ejn63 · Answer

It isn't inconceivable that a drive which is not supported by the BIOS could, under certain circumstances, corrupt data - however, the symptoms you're describing sound more like a faulty drive than a result of an unsupported size drive.

That said, going beyond BIOS support is uncharted territory - you might try a 120G drive to see if it solves the problem.

joydivision82 · Answer

There has been no data loss. However after the BSOD the BIOS no longer finds the drive and the machine won't boot. I have to then power it down and the machine boots into windows again until the BSOD appears again. This is a continious cycle. I have run all the diagnostics and it says the drive is fine (i.e not faulty). I have also tested the RAM and that is fine.

I don't have any spare 80 or 120gb IDE drives spare to test as the only spare drives I have are sata.

Storage, Drives & Media

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