IBM Thinkpad T42 hard disk problem.

[thinkthink]

Hi All,

When I power on the Laptop the Windows XP boots and everything gets loaded. But after 5 or 10 minutes the response is very slow. If I click on any window and try to open any folder or open internet explorer it is taking around 1 or 2 minutes to respond. I tried in several ways to scan disk and defragment but still that is of no help. I also tried "Automatically Fix File System Errors" and "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" but still this problem is there. Even when I do shutdown it is taking too much time to get shuts down around 15 to 20 minutes.

When I power on again NEXT DAY Windows XP boots and everything gets loaded very fast. Again after 5 or 10 minutes the response is very slow. This problem is happening from couple of days.

I then used "IBM Rescue and Restore" to load entire Operation System fresh. Still the problem did not get rectified.

Can anyone please let me know if this is Hard Disk problem or something else. I am guessing it is related to Hard Disk.

If it is Hard Disk problem how do I backup (clone) from this old Hard disk to NEW HARD DISK(after buying).

If I buy NEW HARD DISK and NEW OPERATION SYSTEM CD/DVD OEM VERSION will it work? Does existing Mother Board ALLOW it to load any NEW OEM VERSION OPERATING SYSTEM?


Thanks

[kiwipad]

Hopefully one of the T4x gurus will pick this up, but in the meantime my 2c...

If it is a hard disk problem then it's likely to be a low-level one that wouldn't be found/fixed with OS-level tools. Depending on the brand of disk you may be able to find manufacturer tools to run tests - run from a bootable CD if possible. It sounds similar to a problem I found with a new WD disk (SATA, I was using in an ultrabay adapter) which began to display similar symptoms after a month's use - turned out to be a faulty disk controller (onboard).

While a replacement disk won't be expensive it would be worth trying to verify the fault really is the disk before buying a replacement, as those symptoms may equally be caused by a fault elsewhere.

There are a few threads around on disk cloning. But in answer to your second question, yes you can install any OS to a new hdd - you just won't get all the IBM "goodies" and will have to download all the device drivers from Lenovo/IBM support site...and as that will include network device drivers you will need to download and save them to a working machine as you might struggle to get Internet connection without networking

IG

[Norway Pad]

Maybe a shot in the dark, but try Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Event Log. Then select System from the folders on the left, and see if there are any red Error tags related to your hard drive. A while back, I discovered by coincidence that my T42 was constantly writing errors for a bad sector on the HDD. In my case, chkdsk didn't find any errors, and it never caused problems or performance issues. Maybe I was just lucky.

Worth a try, unless you have already checked it.

[Msmax]

Try to check your HD with HDD Regenerator.
If the harddisk has any problems then this program will show for sure.
The program can aslo try to regenerate the bad sectors.
Will tell you if succeeded or not.

I have recoverd 4 harddisks now complete in operation without any problems, including T43 and T400 ones.
The T43 one was damaged when the notebook dropped...

Regards, Msmax