Thinkpads Forum

Alright, I have a T23 thinkpad, it's otherwise orginal... another 128mb stick of ram.. here's my problem.... After maybe using this laptop for 4 months or so "bought it used", my hard drive started to make a tick, toc.. sound... it would happen sometimes, alot, sometimes and then very little... Then it would happen more often, if it was idle or not it wouldn't matter. My harddrive started to become sluggish... so I decided to format.. reinstall windows etc..

After the format it became worse, louder.. I then reinstalled windows, and the problem happend again, I searched around and found a program to test your hard drive.. in I belive it was DOS, it said that my drive has failed do to, to much shock...

I then decided, I need a new harddrive. I went to bestbuy and picked up a 40gb western digital scorpio hard drive, I installed hard drive, installed windows.... now it started up again.... it was very quiet at first.. I would just ignore it, but it's getting louder.. and sluggish..

Anyone know what the problem with my cursed laptop is?

Thanks alot,
John

Try defrag, if possible with Diskeeper if you don't have you can download a 30 free trail. Good luck

Tried it on both harddrive, still nothing..

You might try testing your new drive. I don't know if Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test will work on your but you can download it from their site. Western Digital may have their own version, try their site.

Having a new drive repeat the symptoms of your old drive sounds suspicious. You might try reseating your drive in its bay again. It might be a mainboard problem. Those problems seem to manifest themselves in a wide variety of ways. This doesn't sound at all inconsistent with a mobo problem.

hitachi one, wouldn't work with my computer... and western digital.... showed everything to be good, smart was fine...

did a short test.. and did an extended test it's all fine?
I'm currently not using the laptop, just incase it makes things work..
so it could be a mainboard problem?

hondalover wrote:so it could be a mainboard problem?

It wouldn't be the strangest problem I've seen attributed to a mainboard. Erratic CD and USB problems are very common and often the result of a bad mobo. Since your drive appears okay there really isn't too much else to suspect. You might keep your eye open for a good used mobo at a decent price.

anyway to test the motherboard for problems..

and my usb seems fine?

It appears you have some sort of hardware problem. If you don't already have it, you may want to download and run PC Doctor for Dos. You can obtain it here:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... IGR-4YZM3F

Thanks, all give it a try and let you guys or girls know the result...
I belive it is a hardware problem to

"also my 1st harddrive failed with this error after all the clicking sounds, I would turn on computer BSOD, and get the error unable to mount boot volume, something along the lines of that.. I couldn't acess anything anymore, I read many how to fixes this but nothing came sucessful, I could thankfully retrive some files from my hardrive using knoppix "linux", but then it becamse super unstable, even loading... it off the cd-rom"

but I will try this doctor thing

Thanks,
John

Alright i'm running that doctor program, I went to system board... for diagnostics... and i pressed F5 it's doing 77 test right now.... now the 77 test, is that everysingle one there is or it's 77 test for the main board

...system board... for diagnostics... and i pressed F5

The whole series of system board diags run when you press F5

Have you upraded the Firmware for the HDD? That is the only other thing I can think of that could cause something like that.

nope, there are no upgrades for my hd...
all test passed?

also, after everything passes...

I tried something different, I took it out the dvd-rom drive, put in the floppy and removed my pcmia card for interent....

It's not clicking it's been on for 5 minutes already....?