New Hard Drive

[chenaria541]

To make a longish story short, I recently dropped my Asus laptop that I'd bought from Best Buy a lil while ago and am having some issues. At first I tried to boot up my laptop and after the BIOS screen windows wouldn't load. I ended up reinstalling Windows 8 and wiping my hard drive entirely which solved part of the problem. Now, windows boots up just fine but my computer is super laggy after a few minutes of being on. For example, Chrome stops respond along with just about any other program I try to run. The computer usually freezes and then unfreezes after about a minute or so. It gets really bad when I try to download something. So with all this being said I just have two questions. Firstly, is this a sign that my hard drive is damaged? I already opened up the pc and everything appears to be intact (motherboard clean, ram intact, etc). Plus I know that the hard drive is the most fragile part, but I just wanted to check here to be sure as the symptoms do indicated a bad HDD. Also, if I buy a new hard drive, how can I install Windows 8.1 on it again? The laptop came preinstalled with windows 8.1 and it didn't come with a recovery disk (laptop doesn't have cd drive). I also wasn't given a product key (I think it's bound to the motherboard?) I know this has been asked and probably answered before but I'm having a hard time finding a definite answer since I don't wanna blow off money on a HDD for nothing. Any help is HUGELY appreciated.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Run a hard drive scan. There are tons of programs to do this for you. Seagate has a good one I've used (not sure if it works with non-Seagate drives; probably does)

 

[SchizTech]

Yes, SeaTools works on all HDD.

 

[Solandri]

Yes your symptoms are consistent with a damaged hard drive (though it's not the only problem which could be causing those symptoms). You may want to check how much RAM Windows is reporting the laptop has. The other main problem I can think of which matches your symptoms is if half your memory is non-functional, and Windows is running on a lot less RAM than it needs.

As for reinstalling Win 8, it's downloadable as long as you have a legit key (even if it's built into the motherboard). You can find instructions here.
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/download-microsoft-windows-and-office/download-microsoft-windows/download-windows-8-1-retail-and-oem-iso/

 

[chenaria541]

Alright so I used the windows memory diagnostics tool and it didn't report anything and I used the SeaTools program in which case S.M.A.R.T and the self scan option worked fine but the short scan would freeze midway, so I'm guessing it is indeed the hard drive? Also Windows reports the full 8 gb of RAM tho it says 7.89 is usable.

 

[Solandri]

Alright so I used the windows memory diagnostics tool and it didn't report anything and I used the SeaTools program in which case S.M.A.R.T and the self scan option worked fine but the short scan would freeze midway, so I'm guessing it is indeed the hard drive?

In the SMART diagnostics, note the number of reallocated sectors.

Run a disk sector scan. Unfortunately, Microsoft dumbed down the interface with Win 8, so you'll either have to use chkdsk /b in a command prompt or a third party tool (many of the third party tools have a graphical interface so you can watch the pretty lights flash to show you progress). The /b scans every sector for errors, including unallocated ones. This will take really a long time. A few hours if there are no problems, overnight or longer if there are problems.

Check the SMART diagnostics again. If it was a HDD problem, the number of reallocated sectors should have gone up by a lot. If SMART doesn't complain about the number of reallocated sectors, this may have fixed your problem.* All the damaged sectors have been reallocated to reserve sectors, and the drive has extra reserve sectors left over so can continue to be used.

* I still wouldn't trust the drive though. More than likely what happened was when you dropped the laptop, the impact caused the heads to touch the spinning platters. This scraped some of the material off the platter, and the problems you're experiencing is the drive having problems reading/writing to that scraped area because there's less or no more magnetic material there anymore. That's why reallocating the bad sectors should fix it. The bigger problem though is that material that was scraped off the platters is still bouncing around inside the drive. Eventually some of these fragments will lodge in between a head and platter, resulting in more material being scraped off, causing the problems to recur and the drive to further degrade.

 

[chenaria541]

Not sure if the computer will perform all of that without freezing a ton. Honestly, if it is the hard drive I would rather buy a bigger one or even invest a a decent SSD. But I'm just having a very difficult time knowing that it is FOR SURE the HDD =/