Bad Hard Drive? Worth Replacing?

[fancypants3000]

Hello,

My Dell Vostro 1440 is less than 4 years old and has been crashing every week or so on and off for a few months.

This week it stopped being able to restart windows after being in sleep mode. I ran startup repair but it wasn't able to fix the problem.

This morning it started crashing about every five minutes. I ran a check disk and repair and it did repair some files but now it is unable to start windows.

The computer starts and wants me to run startup repair, which won't work when I click on it. I can click on start windows normally and it moves from the start up screen to a black screen and occasionally flashes a blue screen but then goes back to black.

I am curious if this problem could be remedied by reinstalling the operating system but I suspect the hard drive has gone bad. I have invested some money last year in a new battery and doubling the RAM so it would be great if I could get away with just a new hard drive which I would try to install myself.

However, I don't know too much about computers and I am afraid the motherboard may not last long enough to make this worth it?

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there fancypants3000,

After your system is prompting repair, then most probably the HDD is failing or completely failed.
I doubt that reinstalling OS will help as most probably the HDD has lots of bad sectors on it. You can check whether this is the case if you just test the drive. In case you system boots up, you can download a brand specific HDD testing tool(or a third party one) and test the drive. In case your system can't boot up, you will need to use some HDD testing tool for DOS.

In case you have some data on the drive, you may need to use some data recovery tool for DOS as well. You can check this out: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/267999-32-recover-data-mode

If the results show that there is something wrong with your drive, you can just get a new one. There are quite a lot of tutorials on the internet on how to change the HDD of a laptop.

Why do you think that your MOBO is going to fail? This is not really one of the components that fails often.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[vesp3r]

I agree with the above post. If HDD is failing you wont do much reinstalling windows, it will work for few days, maybe less or maybe more and do the same thing. You could try 1st to boot into safe mode to confirm its not just a software/driver problem
BTW if you have your windows CD you could try to perform repair through it and see if it will boot up, other than that i suggest finding f/e live cd OS and boot from it to see if your drive is present and this way you can test it/transfer data (unless your drive failed)
http://getintopc.com/softwares/operating-systems/windows-xp-live-cd-free-download/ here is a link for live win xp

 

[fancypants3000]

Thanks for all the wisdom D_Know! And, sorry for the late reply, I've been offline for awhile now. Just a follow up question, if I buy a new hard drive will I need to buy the new operating system? I still have the reinstall disk that came with my laptop and I'm hoping I can just use that license number?
Also, I thought the MOBO was failing because it doesn't beep anymore at startup, just something I read. Although I can't actually remember how much it used to beep before. Is this a cause for concern?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Yeah, I guess you should be able to your the OS that you have already bought.

Your system is working right? If this is the case, but just the MOBO doesn't beep, I would say that there is most probably nothing to worry about. If everything is working fine, then I guess there may be something wrong with the MOBO beeper.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD