Odd errors - disk / memory? c111

**frax** · 02-24-2008, 10:46 PM

Hi,

My trusty Travelmate C111tci is about to give in after almost 4 years of daily service (it has also been with me in Africa, North America and Asia).

Anyways - the problems started about a week ago with disk/filesystem errors and BSODs - after a bit the computer refused to boot complaining about a faulty driver (win32k.sys or ntfs.sys). Note that this is not the original disk, but a 80GB travelstar that I upgraded to.

I took out the disk and ran checks on it, and sure enough the file system was corrupted - and I bought a new disk, a samsung 160GB disk.

After spending some time installing stuff on the new disk (seemed to work fine), it too bailed out with file system errors.

File system corrupted here too.

I have run some tests on the surfaces on both of these disks, and they seem to be ok. Neither disk exhibits any "typical" behavior related to disk failure (weird noises, occasional error messages, sudden disconnect, getting stuck/slow on some operations). Disks that are acting funny on delivery are not unknown, but I find it unlikely that it would happen with the exact same behavior as the previous travelstar...)

So my current theory is that it is not a disk failure, but something else - memory or motherboard/controller. Or possibly that

(running memtest86 off a usb-drive now)

Any tips on what this could be? Has anyone seen anything similar?

If it is the mobo - then I'll give in, unless I can pick up a used machine for parts easily...

**frax** · 02-26-2008, 04:08 AM

ok - more information - it seems like it mostly fails when the computer is cold. If I then run memtest it will list tonnes of errors, and if I try to boot XP when the machine is cold, it fails, either on a .sys during bootup, or BSOD in the latter stages of the boot-up process.

But - if the machine is warm/hot, e.g. if one runs memtest for some time before trying to boot up XP, then everything seems to run fine. Odd huh?

I will try to switch around the memory banks tonight, but I have a feeling that it might be something on the mobo.