Toshiba A305-S6872 Laptop trouble with hard drive

[Sarangapani]

Hi, I own a Toshiba A305-S6872 Laptop which was working perfectly, but since last 1 week I am having problem with the hard drive of the laptop. I have recently installed windows 7 in it and after that only, it is unable to recognize.

Apart from this the DVD disappearing, the HDD problems began a few days ago, while I attempted to carry on the Norton Security Suite to do several regular maintenance such as disk clean up and defragmentation, but the suite failed to load and after that I had the hardest time getting the computer to do anything. lastly I was able to schedule a chkdsk, which took (no exaggeration) 2 days to run. It had even said something about a corruption in various file that was in the Norton directory.

Any idea what is going on? Any suggestion for resolving this would be appreciated.

[Aalap]

generally speaking a hard disk can be unsuccessful in four ways that will direct to a potential loss of data:

• Firmware Corruption or Damage to the firmware zone
  
  
• Electronic Failure
  
  
• Mechanical Failure
  
  
• Logical Corruption

Off course, Combinations of these four types of failure are also possible. Whether the data on the HDD is recoverable or not replies on precisely what has occurred to the disk and how bad the damage is.

[Donatien]

are you getting any particular symptom with the HDD? Such as,

1- The hard disk will spin up when powered on, but be incorrectly recognised / not recognised at all by the computer.

2- The hard disk will not spin up when the drive is powered on, appears dead.

3- When powered on, the hard drive will immediately begin to make a regular ticking or clicking sound

It would be better if you specify the exact symptom that you are having with the hardware so that I can assist you better.

[Mahalingam]

frequently the easiest and the major complex troubles to treat with, logical errors can range from simple things such as an unacceptable entry in a file allocation table to truthfully terrible troubles such as the corruption and failure of the file system on a harshly fragmented drive.

Logical errors are dissimilar to the electrical and mechanical troubles above as there is typically nothing 'physically' wrong with the disk, just the information on it.

[Anjan1990]

As you have mentioned that you have installed the newer operating system, I think the corruption is there only and I think reinstalling it may fix it.
I would like to suggest you to do the same thing.

[HankH]

In the case of corrupted files system is by far the most ordinary. There are numerous ways of analyze and fixing the corrupted/missing files. If this was presently a software trouble, the hard disk will prolong to work correctly though carry on with in mind that this may also be a signs of worsening and backup daily!

Also the hard disk will require several defensive maintenance. make sure it for errors each few days or at least every week. To do that you must be logged in an admin account, then right-click the “C” drive in “My Computer”, and choose “Properties”, after that “Tools”, next click on the “Check Now” push button.

Now here you have to choose both boxes and click on “Start”. Windows will tell you that the “hard disk cannot be checked now but you can schedule a check for the next restart”. At this moment you have to simply click “OK” and reboot the laptop. The check will obtain from about 30-40 min. to over 2 hours, so do it when you’re not preparing to utilize the laptop for some time.

[akkiiii]

I think according to me you should try to contact your HDD manufacturer and replacement of the hardware.

Because though I have read the question of yours I was not able to determine whether there is any hardware problem or software problem, but testing it from the service center will put an end to the issue and surely you’ll get some sort of solution.