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So I'm Wikipedia-ing on my Dell Inspiron 6000 this morning when the system locks up. I rebooted and it gave the message "Internal HDD Hard Drive Error". It wasn't a BSOD or anything like that; it was just on a black screen. So I rebooted it again and it did the same thing, and again and again. After 5 tries, I ran an Extended Diagnostic you get from the boot menu. After it finished (about an hour and a half later), it gave all hardware components a pass. At this point I called Technical Support and the guy is talking to me about booting from the Windows CD when just for the heck of it I boot it up again to see what happened. It went to Windows successfully, and did so again when I restarted to make sure it wasn't a fluke. The tech support guy was just as confused as I was.

Anyway, I know that there are some pretty tech-savvy people here, so I was hoping someone could give me some input on what the heck happened with my computer. I mean, it seems like I fried the hard drive and then an hour later it works perfect. Any clues?

I am far from a computer whiz. At the local computer club they showed a photo of a fan above the hard drive and it was just full of dust all the fins were just blocked up.

This can easily be cleaned BUT BUT don't attempt it unless you know exactly what you are doing.

It was caused by the computer sitting on carpet and sucking up all the dust.

I actually cooked a mother board because I had closed off all the colling vents in front and beneath the computer.

Now I have installed an extra fan and the computer sits on 20mm foam strips well away from the vents and it runs perfectly even on the hottest days.

This might not be your problem but if you have a over heating HD it is well worth loking into.

Keith

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Backup all your information, two days from yesterday. It's most likely a hard drive about to croak. I'd say check the cable, but it's a laptop so it doesn't have one. You're not using it while wrapping it in a blanket, are ya? Blow out all the vents with a can of compressed air and backup your stuff. There really isn't much you can do once they start to fail but start looking for a new one. You can get a faster one with a higher capacity to slip in there

look in your event logs under "system" for any kind of errors on "disk" or "srv". if you have any, your drive is not long for this world.

you can get to event viewer by right clicking on "my computer" and clicking "manage".

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

Backup all your information, two days from yesterday.

How does one, uh, do that? I know it's probably something terribly simple, but I have the skills of a punch-drunk toddler when it comes to computers.

look in your event logs under "system" for any kind of errors on "disk" or "srv". if you have any, your drive is not long for this world.

Yeah, there are a few. Sigh. I guess I know what I'm asking for for Christmas.

Thanks for the help.

You could grab a few DVD's and just start burning all your photos/music/documents etc so you can reload them when you get a new drive or (easier option) you could use another hard drive to clone your current one onto. That way when you get a new drive, all you need to do is partition it and clone yours back onto it, and voila, you're good to go. If you have a friend who's savvy and has the correct cable, they could do it for you in short order.

But go easy on the data transfer - a few hours of prolonged spinning will push a dying drive over the edge.

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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

or use one of those jump drives, or if you have an external usb harddisk, put everything on there until the problem is fixed.

I keep an 80gb external around for problems just like that.

Fish tanks are an expensive addiction

I backed up everything important, but my computer hasn't even so much as hiccuped since the 13th.

hmmm one of our computers did that. then it worked again fro a while. then broke again. took it too the computer repair gut and he put a new hdd in, whiped everything off it. he did not tell us he was going to do that. lost lots of photos that were only on that computer the computer was only 5-6 years old but i think older computers last longer than new computers. same with other things like fridges, tvs etc... had a computer from before i was born and it still works today! can even play sim city 2000 on it!. although we sold it as it was not muck use anyway, couldnt acess the internet, or networks, and only had a 100mb hard disk and 32mb of ram. ni its days thought it was the best computer you could buy.

i have a dell laptop (inspiron 1501) cheapest laptop they had at the start of the year. got windows vista on it, bad idea. only has 512 mb of ram and single 1.8ghz processor,so its slow. going to put mor ram in it over the holidays, probably about 2gb. should make a slight improvement

and thats a longer post than i was expecting, probably because im bored...........on christmas day

hi
woot woot woot woot woot woot

Trust me, it will fail. Replace that bad boy with a scorpio or something.