HP 6510b laptop hard drive failure, work pc

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I was surprised at work today that my hp 6510b business notebook hard drive failed, windows xp wouldn't load. I got it new when I started with my company back on 9/22/08. I didn't save anything on the hard drive either, everything is saved on the network drives. The IT dept is going to give me a new one tomorrow. Typical for a new laptop hard drive to only last almost 8 months?
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No, unless it was dropped. Hard drive failures are on a bell curve. The factory duds will fail early on and then itll all be good until it reaches end-of-life. My Linux hdd is a 250GB Seagate and has nearly 30000 hours on it. My Windows drive is a 500GB Seagate I bought last year. It failed with less than 500 hours. The replacement has 4500 hours. :p
 
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Thats what happens when you download porn.
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Just kidding.
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I don't see why your hard drive would fail if the computer is not that old.
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Originally Posted By: Cutehumor
I was surprised at work today that my hp 6510b business notebook hard drive failed, windows xp wouldn't load.


OK, I'll take one for the team and ask the obvious, but potentially silly question: Are you positive it is a hardware failure and not some sort of Windows SNAFU? "Windows" and "SNAFU" are like two peas in a pod.

I'd pop in a Linux-based live CD and do some poking around; as one of the prior posters made the real point: A faulty lemon of a hard drive woulda/ shoulda failed sooner than this.
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more

OK, I'll take one for the team and ask the obvious, but potentially silly question: Are you positive it is a hardware failure and not some sort of Windows SNAFU? "Windows" and "SNAFU" are like two peas in a pod.



The best way to check is power it up with either a CD or USB image of linux or plug the drive in another PC booted from another HD, and use a smart tool to check the status. Most of the failed drive have a reallocated sectors count through the roof, and you can check other status and see what is the cause (i.e. overheat, shock sensor value, hours of operation, spin retry, off track, etc).

Does your laptop have a dead cooling fan inside?
 
Best bet is to just expect a hard drive to fail at any moment, without notice. The constant moving, lifting, carrying, shaking, and just general day-to-day use tends to bring their internal drives to an end sooner than their desktop counterparts.
 
IT tech support guy on the phone told me to do a HD diagnostic through "F10" Hard drive came back as "disk drive error" I did it three times to make sure. none of the safe mode, safe mode with networking, command prompt, last known configuration, or start windows normally options worked. He had me go to an advanced menu to "disable system reboot" or something like that. the pc booted back into the same startup boot options.

Laptop was used on a docking station at work. However, this laptop had to be reimaged twice by IT because their was some faulty stuff going on with microsoft communicator. I was "connected" to the company's network but people couldn't see me on the network. They tried everything they could think of. They ended up reimaging it twice, 2nd one took. now the hard drive crashed four months later unexpectedly. I do have a linux cd, but I got backtrack and [censored] small linux.

now that I remember it, a lady who teaches training for the company. She had the exact same failure with the same laptop model/brand, but this was when I first started. windows wouldn't boot. Everyone in my company has the HP 6510b model
 
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How was the hard drive used? We have hard drive failures all the time at work because they are constantly spinning, reading, writing, deleting, copying, pasting, etc. It happens on all of our Linux and Windows boxes that act as pseudo servers. Failures have ranged from 3 months to 5 years in age.

I've heard that heat can sometimes be an issue too.
 
If the same type of laptop has frequent failure on HD, it is either the HD they source from has a design issue (i.e. the IBM Deathstar 75GXP, Maxtor DiamondMax8, Seagate 7200.11, etc) or the laptop has ventilation and vibration/shock issue.

Unless you use it as a server, usage profile usually won't kill a drive. Heat and mishandling are usually the biggest user caused failures.
 
Originally Posted By: PandaBear
Unless you use it as a server, usage profile usually won't kill a drive. Heat and mishandling are usually the biggest user caused failures.

I think any time you move a spinning HDD you're taking a risk. The platters develop quite some inertial mass when they're zooming around at 5000+ RPM. Jar the drive, and that can add up to a pretty big mess. Enforcing a mandatory spin-down interval before removing hot-swappable drives has really extended usable lifetimes in our drive racks.

O/T story about usage profiles: a line of HDDs I consider nearly bulletproof in workstation service (the 3.5" Raptors, all models) have been pretty fragile as small business server HDDs. Getting hammered by non-sequential read requests all day really takes its toll on these things.
 
Moving a spinning HDD slowly is usually not a big deal. The head is designed for a particular rpm, air pressure, and temperature to fly at a particular height (usually 7-10 um), and it is not passively set, but actively controlled in a servo loop, spring load on the control arm, and in the last couple of years, and the thermal expansion of the head in the form of a heating coil.

The actuator (arm) of today's drive are not landing anywhere near the writable part of the platter. The back EMF of the spinning platter is wired back to the actuator coil and force them to a parking spot so it should not cause hard landing.

But that doesn't means there are other types of failure that can be prevented by a spin down interval, like the high G in the removal process while spinning.
 
Originally Posted By: PandaBear

Unless you use it as a server, usage profile usually won't kill a drive.


What about these systems that don't have enough memory and are constantly thrashing the hard drive because everything is swapped out to disk? I've seen more than a few like that.
 
Originally Posted By: brianl703
Originally Posted By: PandaBear

Unless you use it as a server, usage profile usually won't kill a drive.


What about these systems that don't have enough memory and are constantly thrashing the hard drive because everything is swapped out to disk? I've seen more than a few like that.


But I've seen more than of a few of them still running after 10 years like that
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Originally Posted By: brianl703
What about these systems that don't have enough memory and are constantly thrashing the hard drive because everything is swapped out to disk? I've seen more than a few like that.


Non server typically don't run 100% load constantly. Most of the time the CPU and memory is sitting idle, along with the HDD.
 
Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL

But I've seen more than of a few of them still running after 10 years like that
wink.gif



I don't know how anyone can deal with a PC that takes 15 minutes just to become somewhat usable after you turn it on..let alone for 10 years.
 
Originally Posted By: PandaBear

Non server typically don't run 100% load constantly. Most of the time the CPU and memory is sitting idle, along with the HDD.


Not if, for example, it's running Windows XP with 128MB of RAM. That system WILL be thrashing the hard drive as long as someone is using it. It's almost to the point where I can look at a hard drive light and KNOW the system needs a memory upgrade based on the fact that it never turns off for more than 1/4 second.
 
Originally Posted By: brianl703
Not if, for example, it's running Windows XP with 128MB of RAM. That system WILL be thrashing the hard drive as long as someone is using it. It's almost to the point where I can look at a hard drive light and KNOW the system needs a memory upgrade based on the fact that it never turns off for more than 1/4 second.


Do you seriously think this computer is usable even with a functional hard drive? It is probably the last thing it deserves.
 
Originally Posted By: PandaBear

Do you seriously think this computer is usable even with a functional hard drive? It is probably the last thing it deserves.


I wouldn't use it, but I've seen enough computers in that condition to know that some people would and think it's normal. One of them had no less than 10, yes, 10 toolbars loaded into IE.

It's almost to the point where I don't even want to look at anyone else's computer anymore.
 
Originally Posted By: brianl703
Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL

But I've seen more than of a few of them still running after 10 years like that
wink.gif



I don't know how anyone can deal with a PC that takes 15 minutes just to become somewhat usable after you turn it on..let alone for 10 years.


I still have my old 486 SX/25 at my parents place. Used to run FreeBSD on it. Had 48MB of RAM and a 1.6GB WD HDD.
 
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