Laptop Wont Work

[nkyskate]

I am completely stumped on this one. The other day my girlfriend had turned off her laptop then restarted it multiple hours later. It was running fine before she turned it off. When it was restarted it said multiple files were corrupt. So i formatted and reinstalled windows. After the first windows setup restart it stopped again saying bad files. I thought it might have been a problem with ram so i took out one of the sticks and tried every combination i could with it to see if one of them was faulty. There was no progress with this. So now i seek your wisdom.

It is a compaq presario 2100. If there is any other information needed i will be happy to post it once i know what is needed. Thank you.

[kryyst]

Could be a bad harddrive or ide controller.

One step get a live linux cd like ubuntu or knoppix. See if you can boot up on them in the laptop. They don't access the harddrive so they are a good way to test the other components of the machine. If it works then it's probably harddrive related, if not it's something else.

If it is the harddrive you can test it in another machine by getting the right adapters and doing scandisks and defrags on it to see if it fails.

[mtrox]

Good thought on the Linux CD....but if you don't have those, just download Drive Fitness Test (http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/technolo/dft/dftnew.htm). That accomplishes two things:


It is also a boot disk so accomplishes the same tests as Knoppix
Once you boot up, you can also test the hard drive.