Blue error screen - does it mean my hard-drive is failing?

[watzupmark]

Hi,

I use an Acer Ferrari 3400 laptop, 2 years old. On the weekend I experienced the dreaded 'blue screen' error page, saying something about Kernel_stack_inpage_error. It mentioned that I should back-up my data (which I did) as it could be a hard-drive problem and then it performed a physical memory dump.

I restarted and after another 5mins got the same error page. So I decided to restore / format the computer using a the system CD's which restored the C: to the factory settings. This still didn't solve my problem, so I tried to format it again at which point during the process it told me that there was a bad sector found and couldn't continue. What does a bad sector mean? Am I going to need a new computer or can you simply change the hard-drive?

I have recently installed new RAM and I thought this may be the cause, but I checked this with a computer shop over the weekend and they said the one I bought was compatible and working fine.

Can someone please advise what they would do in my situation?

Thanks

 

[akhilles]

Bad sector means the hard disk is corrupt.

Look up your laptop specs & get a formatting utility on a cd/floppy from the harddisk manufacturer's site. Format the hdd. No guarantee.

Oh, yes, bad ram or wrong ram settings can cause BSOD. Try removing the new stick & install os. Unzip & burn it to cd/floppy:

http://www.memtest.org/#downiso

on a working pc of course. Let it boot up on the laptop. It'll do its job by itself. Any error may indicate bad ram or wrong ram settings.

 

[watzupmark]

Thanks for the reply!

I have taken a look at the www.memtest.org site and there are 3 downloadable files. Should I download and use the first one (ISO)? So simply burn iso to cd and then boot up my laptop with the cd in order to fix any bad ram errors?

 

[akhilles]

get this on cd:

http://www.memtest.org/download/1.70/memtest86+-1.70.iso.zip

No it won't fix anything. It tells you if it passes the test. If it doesn't, there'll be errors. 1 is too many. That means either the ram is faulty or the ram settings in bios are wrong.