Dealing with constant hard drive corruption (experience most likely required).

[CrossLOPER]

I've posted this elsewhere, but I need all the help I can get:

I have an Acer 5100 laptop currently in repair. The thing's been crashing constantly for months, but it became unbearable in July. It started with a series of totally random crashes while working. The mouse would freeze and immediately after the screen would display earth tone vertical lines. Another crash would involve a blue screen that would appear on start up after being put on stand by. There have been instances when the laptop started itself up and crashed this way. Yet another would be a black screen which displayed the name of the hard drive in random characters. At that point, it would be impossible to turn it on and several reboots would be in order. I also noticed an extreme slowdown. A 1 GB RAM computer started acting like it had less than 256. Well, I took the thing to Geek Squad (still under warranty). For three months, I have had the following experience: First time, they replaced the HD and the LCD inverter and made me buy 50 dollars worth of restore disks. About a week later, the thing crashed again and I had to take it back. Geek Squad said they could not find a problem and gave it back to me. They did fix a loose mouse button...

The laptop crashed two days later with the black screen appearing again. I took it back. I get a call a few days later with Geek Squad telling me that they could not find a problem, even though the computer froze during diagnostics. Upon receiving the laptop, the computer crashed immediately in front of a GS employee. He stated that they managed to "get it not to do that for two days". They took it in for diagnostics again and now claim that everything is functioning properly and that video games might be the issue. Somehow, I doubt Counter-Strike is the issue.

Geek Squad crap aside, any idea what might be going on with my laptop?

Suggestions have included running Linux live CD to check for HDD errors and running memtest86+ to check RAM. Anyone have anything?

[Lemur]

Bad RAM and motherboard problems are the most difficult to pin down, and they give you the weirdest errors. Memtest is a good idea. The only way I know to check the mobo is through a process of elimination ...

[Blodrast]

As far as HDD tests go, there's really quite a few levels of depth there - I mean, you can do tests, and you can do really stressing tests, that will take many many hours (or days) (I'm thinking of fsck since you mentioned linux).

It's not clear to me that the disk IS the problem, though, from what you've described. If you can't find any pattern at all for crashing, then in my non-professional opinion it is likely NOT the disk. Disk-related problems (be it the medium itself or the controller) tend to be quite repeatable and/or predictable (to some extent).
You can further isolate this if you for example just boot up a live cd and leave it running, or do stuff that does not write to the disk (or at least minimize disk access); and see if you still get those crashes. It's not a sure diagnostic unless you can manage to not access the hdd AT ALL, but it is a good hint, still.

Completely random stuff seems more likely to have to do with the RAM or the mobo (or even the CPU). Btw, another small experiment you might be able to make is the following: if you have more than 1 stick of ram, say 2 x 512M, take one out. Play with the laptop. If nothing happens, switch the sticks.
And even if you have just one stick, you can still do this by using another ram stick (from a friend, or buy one - doesn't have to be a 1G one, as cheap as you can find).

I guess you're getting my point here - process of elimination, like Lemur says. At least you'll know it's NOT the RAM. Or the hdd.

Can you convince the GS guys to change the mobo ?... (I don't even know if they do that, they might just end up giving you a new machine altogether).

Anyway, you can try these couple of things to narrow it down a bit.

[Blodrast]

One more thing, why did you title your post "constant hard drive corruption" ?
From the content of your post, I didn't see any signs of that anywhere. On the contrary, you said they replaced your hdd and you STILL have problems.
I'd like to understand what makes you think it's hard drive corruption, because, judging from what you've described to us, sure doesn't sound like it to me.

[Lemur]

You also might want to be careful with what's on the HDD when you give it to Geek Squad. They have a bit of history when it comes to borrowing your more, um, colorful entertainment.

[CrossLOPER]

Blodrast, I'll get back to you.

You also might want to be careful with what's on the HDD when you give it to Geek Squad. They have a bit of history when it comes to borrowing your more, um, colorful entertainment.

I have a habit of zero trust when giving away sensitive information to others. I wiped the slack space and over-wrote every loose file before I gave it to them. I'm assuming that this did not contribute to the problem since I do this with all of my computers.

Also, it's nice to know that they're not wasting time.

EDIT: I would like to know ho they set up the desktop to record what is being done. I'm afraid that the only thing they are doing when running "diagnostics" is running scandisk.

[CrossLOPER]

One more thing, why did you title your post "constant hard drive corruption" ?
From the content of your post, I didn't see any signs of that anywhere. On the contrary, you said they replaced your hdd and you STILL have problems.
I'd like to understand what makes you think it's hard drive corruption, because, judging from what you've described to us, sure doesn't sound like it to me.

I posted that because despite restorations and replacements, the HDD seems to become corrupt, in its name anyway.

I would like more info on that live CD method. I've had several people suggest that and I am a novice in trouble shooting computer hardware.

[Blodrast]

For the live cd part, you can go here for example: http://www.slax.org/, although this place http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php
gives out a pretty long list of live cd's you can get.

Then, my idea was that you could run fsck (http://linux.die.net/man/8/fsck) and badblocks (http://linux.die.net/man/8/badblocks) on your disk. Careful with badblocks, you can mess up your disk (I mean, even worse) if you're not doing it properly. I suggest reading the docs on it carefully.

HOWEVER... there may be a problem. If your fs is NTFS, then you may be out of luck. It's been a while since I've been interested in this, so I haven't kept up, and I don't know what the current status with linux support for NTFS is anymore; more specifically, sure, NTFS is supported, both with read and write support, that's all fine, and it's been so for years. That, I know. But for trickier things, like fsck, I don't know if the support is available.

Some google led me to this: http://wiki.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsprogs
and if you scroll down to the "Users utilities" section, it says:

The following tools are planned, but not yet implemented:

* ntfsck: fsck for NTFS.
* ntfsdefrag: defrag NTFS volumes.

If you have VFAT, then you can use fsck.vfat (http://linux.die.net/man/8/fsck.vfat), and it's all good. But if it's NTFS, you might need to dig deeper and see if anybody wrote an implementation of fsck for NTFS.

All of this of course has the standard disclaimer, if you're unsure of what you're doing then first ask, read the docs carefully, don't sue me/send goons to kill me if you mess your machine up (even worse), etc, etc, etc.

Right. Well, that's my thoughts on this for now. Word of advice, if you do end up using badblocks, it may take a really long time, depending on your disk specs and the kind of errors (if any). Last time I did this, it took several days - and it was a small disk (uhm, like 70GB or so, and it was SCSI, too. True though that the problem was the controller with that one...).