jacki3k00

Please help me if you have any idea what really went wrong with my laptop.

I have an 1 year old Sony Vaio VGN series and it is pre-installed with Vista Premium. The RAM is indicated as 3GB in the box (and I have never paid attention to the actual spec in the Windows itself).

I dropped my laptop and when I tried to boot up, the following message displayed on the screen -

"A read disk error occurred
Press ctrl+alt+del to restart"

I wasn't sure if it was the hard disk failure so I went ahead to perform a laptop recovery, using the recovery disk that I had created using the recovery wizard.

However, the screen becomes blank after the following message displayed -

"Windows is loading files"

I tried all Fn keys to start the laptop in safe mode but to no avail.
I also tried to use the F10 key to run the recovery program that comes with the laptop but I got the 1st error message on screen.

I searched online and tried power drained, which is to remove the battery and hold on to the power button for 30 - 60 sec, but it did not work.

Thus, I opened up the casing and tried to boot up the laptop, I realized that the Fan was only running for less than 3 seconds and it stopped.

When I booted up the laptop again, I paid attention on the screen and saw that there was only 1GB RAM has been detected.

I removed the 1GB RAM and booted the laptop with the other RAM (2GB) and the laptop does not boot at all.
I inserted only the 1GB RAM and the laptop booted up with the same error messages as described earlier.

Now, I wondered if it is the hard drive failure or it is actually the motherboard failure.

I am not sure what else I could do before sending the laptop for diagnostic.
Could anyone please help if you know what might be the problem with my laptop?
Thank you very much.

TriggerFinger

Looks like a defective HDD to me. Without changing anything yet (yes, put back the RAM you tried replacing), run Hitachi DFT or the diagnostic tool for the brand of HDD being used. Get the HDD diagnostic tool that runs from the CD drive so you won't need to boot into Windows for you to run the diagnostic.

jacki3k00

Thank you so much TriggerFinger, I finally created a bootable cd SeaTools for DOS as I couldn't take out the harddisk to check the brand.

The diagnostic tool is up and running now, and so I have a Fujitsu harddisk that comes with the laptop.

I run a Long test and within minutes there are 99 errors detected. The test did not last for even 5 minutes and the result was Failed.

So it is confirmed that my harddisk is defective? Would there be any possibility that the data could be recovered if I sent the harddisk for data recovery?

Seems that there are secondary problems for the fan and the RAM?
I wondered if it will cost too much to get the so-far-3-found-problems fixed? Sigh...

TriggerFinger

IMO it is too late to be able to get your files out now as the test showed you indeed have a dead HDD... I mean if you DIY. However if you take it to a professional then may be....

As for the RAM, I suggest you run Memtest86+ (CD based RAM diagnostic).

About the fan, I believe it is working as designed.

jacki3k00

Thanks again TriggerFinger.
I had finally run the Memtest86+ but I wasn't quite sure on how to read the result. Hopefully you would help me again with my findings.

While the test is running,
I saw on screen on the top left corner, stating -

L1 Cache : 32K 28099 MB/S
L2 Cache : 2048K 13039 MB/S
L3 Cache : None

Memory 1014MB 2214MB


And on the top right corner -

Pass : ( )%
Test : ( )%
Test : (number of test)
Testing : 132K - 1015M 1014M
Pattern: (randowm numbers that constantly changed)


In the middle of the screen -

Walltime Cache Rsvd Mem Test Error
(time) 1014M 266M Std 0


And after the test was run for about 10 minutes, I see the following message -

Pass complete, no errors, press ESC to exit


I let the test kept running for about 2 hours, I guess the test kept repeating itself for few times (by monitoring the test # on the top right corner). Nothing new that I could see on the screen.

I wondered if the test said anything about all the RAM I have in the laptop?
I have a 1GB and a 2GB RAM that comes with the original laptop configuration.

Thank you very much again.

TriggerFinger

Looks like your RAM is good (you did not mention any messages that says ERROR when you ran Memtest86+).

With that all I can say is that may be you need to consider replacing the hard drive.

jacki3k00

Thank you again TriggerFinger.

So I replaced the defective hard disk and boot up the laptop with the recovery disk that I created,
crossing my fingers that it would work and it did!

The only thing was that my laptop could only detect the 1GB RAM.
I tested the 2GB RAM on 2 different laptops and both laptops did not detect the RAM.

I run the Memtest application with only 1 RAM installed each time, but the laptop did not seem to boot up with only the 'defected' 2GB RAM installed.
I realized that the Memtest application only detected and tested on the working RAM each time therefore it did not show any error when both RAM are installed.

So at the end, I replaced the RAM as well.

This is just a note to appreciate your help! :)

TriggerFinger

My apologies for this late reply but I am happy you got it fixed.

Thanks for the update/.