R51e - sound, network, possible HDD failures

[bhtooefr]

I'm just going to quote posts of mine from another forum, rather than try to recall everything I've said. Originally this started as a sound problem, so that's how this starts as.

System is a ThinkPad R51e. OS independent failure - happens in both WinXP and Ubuntu 7.04.

Chipset is an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M, with integrated sound.

Basically, randomly, the sound will just up and quit. Most programs don't notice anything wrong, however, YouTube videos will start having the sound stutter when it dies, and then after it dies, will stop hard 2 seconds in, and when you move the slider, you only get 2 seconds of play before it stops again.

Also, Windows Sound Recorder will only attempt to play one frame of sound before stopping.

Edit: It does get cleared up by a reboot, however, how long it lasts is a crapshoot.

The other symptoms are related to ALSA (when in Linux) - checking the pipeline simply doesn't work, it freezes.

There have been times where the laptop will suddenly shut off, but they've been related to power supply issues, and haven't happened in a LONG time. Otherwise, perfectly stable.

The laptop IS falling apart (chassis around right hinge failed.) I plan on getting another chassis, but if I can't, or there's any further problems... guess it's time to get an old P2 or P3-based beater. :/

Suggestions for further diagnostics?

(The hinge failure, along with other chassis-related failures on this laptop, are thanks to Solectron. I knew better than to try to fight them, though, they'd just claim it was my fault.)

Someone suggested checking Event Viewer - nothing related to the sound card.

Then...

This morning, got into work, tried to fire the laptop up (after I force shut it down, rather than let it shut down gracefully - it doesn't like when I close the LCD while it's shutting down, and I was in a hurry,) and got a solid beep. Didn't shut up until I turned the machine off.

I finally figured out that removing the battery, holding the power button for 3 seconds, and reinstalling the battery cleared this up. (It did it again when I had to force shut it down again, though...)

Anyway, when it came up, it threw an error about the PCI network card (onboard ethernet, presumably) failing to initialize. I went into the BIOS as it suggested, looked around, and other than the card being disabled now and the MAC being listed as "Not Initialized," everything looked normal. But, I went ahead and rebooted. This time around, the MAC was listed as FF FF FF FF FF FF. I decided to go ahead and go into Windows, though.

Sound was dead right off the bat (usually it takes some time to die.) Other than that, it seemed normal... except... when I started Opera, it threw probably 10 errors saying files on C:\ were corrupted, and to run chkdsk. At that point, I immediately turned the machine off and back on to run memtest, on a hunch - you don't have that many failures without something REALLY wonky going on - like bad RAM. Anyway, it did the beep crap again (but not the network error.) Got that cleared, and it's memtesting right now... I'll post preliminary results when it gets done with this pass...

Still waiting on this pass to finish.

[bhtooefr]

Two passes with no errors... (Yes, I'm using that smiley. Sorry, but I'd rather at least know what it is, and it be RAM.)