Presario 2104us 1720 SMART hard drive warning

[huskerdave]

Had hard drive warning, saved data, few weeks later hard drive stopped responding.  Bought replacement "refurbished" Toshiba 30g hard drive (stayed with original size to avoid any BIOS problems and this is used mainly for internet) upon startup prior to load XP, received same SMART warning referencing the replacement drive MK3021GAS.  Sent it back, supplier issued replacement, installed, same message again identifing the MK3025GAS drive.

Only issue was partition wasn't created upon XP load, but everything works fine except at start up I get the smart message and have to F1 to enter XP. Have run for several hours and restarted manually a few time.

I did run the HP hardware diagnostics and it identified the hard drive as at risk (via smart message?).

Hard to believe 3 drive problems?  Anything else I can check?,  I did see on forum that a failing battery can cause similar issues but my internal clock is losing no time and that was the check suggested.

Thanks

[Huffer]

I would try to clear the eeprom in the BIOS chip by removing the clock battery and try again or perhaps just holding down the f11 key as you power up to restore the BIOS to factory defaults. You can also try removing all the removeable things like hard drives memory and optical drive and battery and without any power hold down the power button for 30 seconds to flush out the capacitors on the motherboard. Now put it back together and try again. I would take the new drive giving the SMART error and attach it to another computer via usb adapter or otherwise and run a full diagnostic on it from there.

If you are getting these replacement refurb drives from the same place I am not prepared to say it is impossible to get 2 bad ones in a row.

Also try the full disk diagnostic test from the Ultimate Boot CD. It really puts the drive through its paces and will read SMART errors independent of the laptop BIOS. Toshiba does not make a hard drive diagnostic tool for its drives (one of the few) but the drive fitness test programs on this disk will test Toshiba drives even though they come from IBM/Hitachi or Maxtor:

http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/

Message Edited by Huffer on 12-04-2008 09:17 AM

[huskerdave]

Thanks for reply, I'll be away for a few days, I like the USB suggestion worst case is I would have a small transportable drive out of the deal.  I'll order a case to check current and inital drive.   These were EBAY refurbished so..., might be good first step.

I checked what it would take to get to internal battery, quite a bit more disassembly than I expected.

I'll touch base once I get drive case and try.

Thanks