So this past two weeks my Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop has been acting a bit funky.. I've found that the laptop boots up, but is super slow. It sometimes never boots up to the user screen, even after waiting 15 minutes, so I end up holding the power button, and turning it off... Other times, when I enter my password at the user screen, the welcome page appears, and stays like that forever, so again I have to manually shut down by holding the power button.. But now, most often what happens is the computer loads up fine, until all my programs and wallpaper are shown. When it shows my wallpaper , the computer takes over 15 minutes to load Mcafee and my Creative Audio Center...

I ended up doing an error check earlier and the error code 2000-0146 popped up. The code came up with this: DST Log contains previous error.
I don't know what to do now. I've read up, and some people have said to replace the hard drive. If I were to replace a new internal hard drive, any recommendations?






Cliffs:
-Laptop acts funny.
-Sometimes welcome screen never shows up, a black screen is all I see.
-Sometimes welcome screen stays on, and nothing happens.
-Ran a disk error check and came got the error code 2000-0146 -DST Log contains previous error.
-What to do now?

 

You can try to take the drive out of the laptop, can air the connections and then plug it in and also run chkdsk on it, but I would back up your stuff now!! How old is the laptop?

 

Whiskers had the laptop for about 2 1/2 years now. I've backed up my school documents and music onto my external so I should be okay!

I did schedule a chkdsk yesterday when I turned off the computer but nothing happened (at least I don't think so)... I just scheduled it to do a chkdsk again when I reboot the computer again.

 

Very, very likely hard drive failure. Can you hear excessive seeking or clicking from the drive?

The only way I would be swayed from the hard drive suspicion is if the computer worked ok in safe mode. Does it? Hit F8 at the very beginning of bootup to choose safe mode.

 

2 1/2 years...Call Dell and bitch at them...

 

Actually, I went into safe mode once, when the welcome screen didn't show after 40 minutes. It worked perfectly in safe mode, so I restarted it, and then everything worked, but the computer took quite some time loading mcafee and creative audio... I'd say over 20 minutes.

 

x2

 

See, the thing is with the NTFS file system, it's robust to a fault. When it tries to write data to a sector on the disk, if that sector is bad, NTFS flags it as bad and finds another sector to write to. When you have a serious drive failure, you're going to have tons of bad sectors. That's going to be tons of seeks and rewrites. Not to mention the sectors that are damaged and unreadable on a first pass and have to be retried over and over.

That's likely the cause of your slowness. Chkdsk should tell you how many sectors have been flagged as bad. I think you can run chkdsk by booting to a command prompt, otherwise it puts the results in the event log, which means you'll have to successfully boot to see the results..

 

Whiskers I will probably call dell soon and bitch at them. I bought my lap[top through my dad's dell corporate business partnership thing.

If by excessive seeking you guys mean the busy light staying on longer than normal, yes.
It now is solid green, or flashing very fast from the log in screen all the way to the home screen and loadup.

 

Here's how I got to chkdsk on my vista laptop:
Start > Computer > Right click on C drive> Properties > Tools > Error Checking> Check Now > check marks on Automatically fix file system erros and scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors.

When I click Start it says Windows can't check the disk while it's in use. Do you want to check for hard disk errors next time you start your computer?

Then I clicked schedule disk check.

Is there another way I can scan when my computer is on?

 

Jeebus just checked event viewer.... HALF of the errors are from this November.... WTF?!?!?






^ This is the start of Nov.

Most of them are:
-The device, \Device\Harddisk0\DR0, has a bad block.
-The NetBIOS Interface service failed to start due to the following error:
NetBIOS Interface is not a valid Win32 application.

wtf?!

 

If you got it through a business account you may have a 3 year warranty on it. Call them. My job has a 3 year on all hardware purchased through dell business.

 

Oh wow, Thanks fuzzy02CLS, i'll definitely give them a call. Hopefully I have this 3 yr warranty too

 

Drive looks like it's toast, but just as an unrelated thought, I saw some NIC errors, which made me think of another symptom/resolution.

Sometimes when a network card goes bad, it starts spewing out useless interrupts, the OS has to handle every single one of them, so it gets bogged down processing them. That's inconsistent with the excessive drive activity you're seeing, but maybe someone will cache that thought for future reference.

 

Hopefully this hard drive will last me until at least the end of my quarter then! I need this for my finals and projects, blahhh!

Hmm, just wondering, but if a network card was going bad, that would mean you can't connect to the internet right?

 

My friend suggested I run Crystal Disk Info so I did. I don't know what this stuff means though.
Here's what showed up:


Does this mean anything? My friend hasn't used it in a long time but told me I should be needing a new HD soon, and the health status:caution supports that theory.

 

That's a Smart test readout and it means your drive is about to die. So time to get another and you aren't going to be covered by dell warranty unless you bought the extended warranty. Which you didn't so jump on newegg and get a new drive install Windows 7 and don't install Mcafee ever again! Install Microsoft Security Essentials

http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

 

That's great that the SMART is recording errors. Manufacturers usually don't argue with that at all.

I don't mean it's great you're getting errors, just great that there is irrefutable proof the drive is dying.

 

Call Paypal.

 

^that never gets old

 

^^^


esp when the OP falls for it and ask how that will help!!

 

So Chkdsk worked this time.

IT fixed a few things.





Numbers are pretty much the same. I guess it's just time to buy a new hard drive?

Anyone have 2.5'' SATA drive recommendations? I'm probably shooting for a 320GB.

 

your hard drive is about to die, back up your data NOW! Via blank DVDs, flash drives, external hard drive, whatever just do it before everything is gone.

 

Eric, you looking for 5400 or 7200 rpm?

I have a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 320GB. Awesome drive and fast!

 

 

Stunna, I backed up everything on 2 different external HD's

Norm, I don't think it matters really Maybe the IT guys can chime in.

I was looking at either:
Western Digital Scorpio Blue 320GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-197-_-Product
or
Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-280-_-Product

I'd just like one that doesn't consume too much power, almost silent, and doesn't generate tons of heat. And of course really reliable.

 

before u send it in.... delete your Pr0n

 

Then get the 5400RPM drive