Thinkpads Forum

i few weeks ago i turned on my thinkpad 600x and i began getting the "Blue screen of death" and messages saying there was missing sytem files. so i wipe the hard drive and notice it took longer than usual. formatting also took long and ended up freezing at various percentages. i was running the stock 12 gb toshiba hard drive. after hearing some strange noises i begin to think the hard drive is blown. so today i buy a refurbished toshiba 30 gb MK3021GAS hard drive, and formmating in the windows 200 setup makes it to 1% and stops. i really need some help, my dad is pestering me to fix this problem fast. any suggestions???? if not the hard drive then what?????

All your symptoms sound like a hard drive failure to me too. I would run PC Doctor for DOS, system diagnostics, to verify you don't have some other hardware problem.

You can download PC Doctor for the 600X from IBM. With this you can diagnose your system. Following is the link:

http://www-3.ibm.com/pc/support/site.ws ... date=false

I second GomJabber. This is exactly what happened to my drive several weeks before failing. Little did I know that I would be losing ALL of my data (including five year's worth of vacation pictures).

thnx ill try that......i left the caomputer formatting over night and it made it to three percent. hopefully pc doctor will help me cause i no it shouldn't take this long.

fortzum wrote:thnx ill try that......i left the caomputer formatting over night and it made it to three percent. hopefully pc doctor will help me cause i no it shouldn't take this long.

You're absolutely right. It should not take near that long to format a hard disk.

when i ran pc soctor the jard drisk test yielded some invalid sectors.........but that doesn't make sense since the hard drive is new. amy thoughts?


right now i am running the quick erase utility...

do u no of any good ntfs formmatting programs that r free and run in dos?

Wow, that sounds a little over my head, but do try this.
make sure the hardrive port is clean and free of debrees.
try spraying down there with a can of air, if the hardrive is brand new but shows the same symptoms, you have other issues, your motherboard may be wearing out, all the above is pretty good advice.
a learning thing for me

fortzum wrote:when i ran pc soctor the jard drisk test yielded some invalid sectors.........but that doesn't make sense since the hard drive is new. amy thoughts?


right now i am running the quick erase utility...

do u no of any good ntfs formmatting programs that r free and run in dos?

It sounds like your 'Refurbished' drive needs more refurbishing. I would get a different drive.

DOS does not support the NTFS file system. You can format your drive with the Windows install CD as you were doing. Alternatively, I believe Linux is free and can format to NTFS. I have no Linux experience however, so I can't help you there.

fortzum wrote:thnx ill try that......i left the caomputer formatting over night and it made it to three percent. hopefully pc doctor will help me cause i no it shouldn't take this long.

There's no such thing as a "refurbished" hard drive!

Drives are either new and error free or they are used. If used, they may have bad sectors or other problems.

Sounds like you got a bad HD, replace it with a new one.

Regards,

James

i bought from a reliable person who said he tested it and said it worked....what i don't understand is why my comp won't format the hard drive....would using a third-party program work?

I suppose it is possible the drive tested OK when the seller tested it, but maybe the drive got bumped around at some point, and got damaged.

If two drives look kind of bad on the same machine, it could be the machine. Meaning the IDE controller may be going flaky, or some connection on the system board is going intermittent.

Since replacing the system board is kind of spendy and takes a lot of time (especially if you've never done it), I would get yet another drive (maybe borrow a known working one) and test that. If that acts strangely too, then replace your system board.

You could try taking the cdrom drive out of the machine and test without it. It's doubtful that's your problem, but since they're both attached to the IDE controller, a problem with one could give you a problem with the other.