Hard Drive Error (03F1)

[MaximumFrank]

Hello, thank you for your time. For the past few months I have been plagued with a pretty serious problem: I get a "Hard Drive Error (03F1)" message on my HP Pavilion g6 1d72nr, but only in special cases. The special cases I mentioned are the times when it decides to stop reading from my HDD. There is no obvious pattern to the failure messages, and if I leave it alone it tends to work again after a while. If I need it immediately, removing and reseating internal components sometimes does the trick, giving me anywhere from twenty seconds to a few hours. After the randomly generated time it halts, generally flashes a BSoD and fails to initialize the disk to write the memory dump. The disk not initializing is to be expected if there is trouble reading from the disk. Occasionally when it crashes it will start throwinf I/O errors. These generally just state that there was a problem when reading from the HDD and storing it into the memory.

The first thing I thought was that I needed to replace my hard drive, as that was the most obvious first step, and it worked. For a while. I upgraded from a 640GB 5400RPM to a 1TB 7200RPM. It took about a month for it to restart from scratch at the same page.

I can say with full confidence that it isn't a hard drive failure for a couple of reasons: firstly, there is no file system damage afterwards; secondly, when plugged in elsewhere, it operates as it should.

So here is what I've already troubleshooted, and if you ask I'll describe how I troubleshooted each component:

1. HDD
2. HDD Connector Board (Not to be confused with the HDD PCB)
3. Power Brick & Battery
4. RAM Modules
5. BIOS

From that leaves the following, at least from what I can deduce:

• Motherboard Components
• Processor

And because a dying processor seems to be pretty binary (either it works or it doesn't), I can pretty strongly rule out that it is the culprit.

That leaves the motherboard. But my personal thought was that a motherboard was also a binary component, so why should it operate so sporadically?

Any help on this would be amazing, as replacing the laptop isn't currently in the budget.

Thank you for your time,

Max.

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

Your logic is impeccable down to the last assumption. CPUs are indeed "binary" (works or it doesn't) but not motherboards. They are fickle demons and one bad capacitor can drive a technician crazy trying to track down the problem. Suffice it to say that a veteran technician could not do more to diagnose the issue than you have and the answer is right there...bad motherboard. 

if this is "the Answer" please click "Accept as Solution" to help others find it. 

[MaximumFrank]

Yeah, there's no way it isn't the motherboard. The hard drive also had been making some noise, and it was actually rather disturbing to hear it. It wasn't of scratching or grinding or anything that would make me worry about its safety, but it was far from general operational noise. 

After a quick search, all I got was that it was a hard drive failure. Since I know it isn't, I disregarded it. On one post, however, somebody said that their hard drive made similar sounds, and the culprit was the PSU, which is why I tested the power brick and battery.

A bad motherboard directly supports that, as for whatever reason voltage regulation to the hard drive is broken. It actually makes more sense that that is the problem. If this laptop had voltage sensors in it I would watch them and look for a correlation, but alas, it does not.

It is that it isn't that there isn't enough power available, it is that there is a problem directing power to it. I can safely say this because I tried with and without most peripherals (I took out all USB powered devices, the BlueRay drive, and all but minimum RAM) and the result was the same. This was both on battery and wall power.

Is there any explanation for why this happened? Could it have been something I did personally, or just an unlucky defect? I only ask because I would rather know and be able to refrain from any actions that could break future hardware than not know and go through this again.

Thank you for your time,

Max.

[Huffer]

Who knows? It is electronics. It is amazing that it ever works at all. The question is not why it broke but why it did not break sooner. You seem like someone who is pretty savvy and I am sure you did not do any of the stuff I see people do all the time and cringe like using the power button to just turn off the computer without shutting it down, carrying a running laptop by its corner, etc.