ZFGC
General => Boards => Archive => Other Discussion => Topic started by: AcidGame on April 20, 2007, 10:11:21 am
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Hey guys...
My laptop has been having some problems lately. It's a Dell Inspiron 8200.. and it's about 4 years old by now. During the last few days, it has
been blue screen of death-ing, at seemingly random times. At first, I thought it might be the RAM, however after running Memtest, without 850.0% coverage with no errors..
My next thought, is that it is the harddrive. Some files got corrupted, so I ran chkdsk to fix them, but the problem is still occurring. Here is the information I've written down from the blue screen's (they go so fast, I usually can't get enough data down):
KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE ERROR
... ...
0x00000007A ...
ftdisk.sys ...
(Not an exaggerated list :P)
Here are my symptoms:
- Blue Screens of Death
- Sometimes the BIOS won't notice a harddrive.
- Sometimes the system won't start up, or it is taking way too long.
- It takes a long time from the time I login to the time the desktop shows up.
- CPU usage drops down to 0 - 1%
What do you think?
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blue screen is always a hardware or driver problem
and yes its somewhere in the drive area...
its either your disk drivers, or the harddrive itself
running chkdsk doesnt fix anything if its broken
you might also wanna check your RAM too
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Have you tried formatting your computer?
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This is not the first time this has happened. And I've formatted then too. It seems to be a recurring issue.
I imagine I might just purchase a new harddrive, if that is the issue.. a bigger and newer one than I have now.
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I have no idea how to fix it, the only thing I know is my comp flashes it up then restarts straight away. the only way I've ever got around it is just to leave my comp on till it starts up right, which can take a while.
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I bought a new computer, and I suggest you do too, unless it's really good.
It could just be breaking down... but yes, try the new harddrive if you can afford it.
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I bought a new computer, and I suggest you do too, unless it's really good.
It could just be breaking down... but yes, try the new harddrive if you can afford it.
I wouldn't waste money on an new hard drive with such an old laptop! If I was you I would start saving money for an new PC.
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It's actually a really good computer for it's age ;-)
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It's actually a really good computer for it's age ;-)
Yeah but your Laptop won't life long anymore!
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I can only give you so much info based on what you were able to get from the screen and the symptoms..
ftdisk.sys is the volume manager driver, so you're correct in assuming that the problem has to do w/ the hard drive.
Because of the fact though that the bios occasionally doesn't notice the drive, that runs down the options to that it's either the hardware is poorly connected (not likely for a laptop) or failing, or if you applied a bios update or changed bios settings some time in the past, there could be a conflict there. I'm thinking it's failing hardware. If it reads the drive for awhile, but then you get a BSoD having to do w/ this file, and such slow speeds also sometimes, I think it's safe to assume the hardware is dying, and the BSoD may be because the driver simply stops detecting the HD (because it stops responding for a certain amount of time). That'd also explain the slower speeds.
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Thanks for your help so far. I haven't updated anything dealing with drivers recently. I will probably go ahead an just buy a new (and bigger) harddrive.
Purchasing a new computer isn't applicable at the moment, as I have more important things I would like to spend my money on.
Status Update:
I got my harddrive ghosted to another one, so I can verify if that is the problem, and the new one is looking pretty good so far. I would like to thank everyone for their input again!