Customer's laptop keeps killing Harddrives..

[artois7]

So I did a repair job for the local kebab shop, who has a Sony Vaio (can't remember the model number right now).

The original hard drive died, so they paid a shop £90 to replace it, and it died within 3 months. They then paid me to replace the drive, which I did, and it's failed around a month later.

The chances of all three drives being duff are extremely slim. It was a brand hew harddrive, it definitely shouldn't have happened after just one month.

Has anybody got any ideas what could be causing this?

[nish_pinto]

Re: Customer's laptop keeps killing Harddrives..

Could be a bad power source maybe?

[ben7]

Re: Customer's laptop keeps killing Harddrives..

Could be a bad power source maybe?

It could be that.

How are the drives failing? Corrupted sectors? The kebab shop could be handling the laptop a little too rough.

[artois7]

Re: Customer's laptop keeps killing Harddrives..

When I got it from last time, it said "disk read error", this time it's saying 'no operating system found', I haven't been to collect it yet so there's a chance the HDD is still ok but I'm assuming the HDD has wiped the partition. I've seen this happen a few times before.

[inflex]

Re: Customer's laptop keeps killing Harddrives..

I've had a client with similar issues - turns out they were just a clumsy person and knocked the laptop a lot. The last I saw of them they banged the laptop on the way out of the door after they'd just powered it up to check that I had done things "right" *sigh*.

Some people just don't treat their hardware with a lot of awareness.

[Gariarto]

Re: Customer's laptop keeps killing Harddrives..

Is it overheating ? Hot drives fail early. I had a customer with a similar problem, it turned out that the lady's son was watching porn with the laptop on/in his bed and blocking the vents. Partially warp-melted the case near the CPU heatsink. Each time I had it in for repair it was full of fluff and animal dander.
Thank goodness it was just fluff !

Soooo many laptop owners (including my daughter) stick laptops on bed-tops, plush furniture, cushions, deep carpets etc and complain "it gets really hot".

'We could have identified a training need' As my old manager used to say.

[mdugdale]

Re: Customer's laptop keeps killing Harddrives..

a failing southbridge can cause this problem. some toshibas have this problem

[ben7]

Re: Customer's laptop keeps killing Harddrives..

a failing southbridge can cause this problem. some toshibas have this problem

Never heard of a southbridge killing an HDD!

Do these computers have a specific chipset in common? or just any chipset?

[fddizon]

Re: Customer's laptop keeps killing Harddrives..

you should interview the owner whats the recent things happened before failures occurred. the issues are different from the prior. cannot conclude yet.

kidding aside. if it kills the hard drive again... call the cops.

[severach]

Re: Customer's laptop keeps killing Harddrives..

The SB doesn't kill the hard drive. It writes invalid sector data which makes it a bad sector. Bad sectors in important places make drives appear to not work. Zero the drive and it will work again.

Zero all those bad drives and try them in your computer. You should find that they all work fine.