Unknown Hard Error...

So my wife's lappy just goes nuckin futs on us today. She's playing WoW... nothing out of the norm... and she starts experiencing random glitches and choppiness in her gameplay. The sound starts crackling a bit... but she just figures it may be a bit of lag. Then, she says she sees a volume control appear at the bottom of her screen, with green bars increasing in width across the screen (like on a TV when you turn the volume up). At this point, WoW locks up on her, and while she's been playing, the lappy has been getting hot as hell...

She does a forced shut down and tries to reboot, and Windows does that nifty endless reboot loop after giving you the option to start up Win normally, or go into Safe Mode, etc.

Here's a bit of info on the compy:

1) Acer Ferrari 3400 *edit* (she's got a Ferrari 3200... can't find it on their website... I believe the only difference is the CPU clock speed)
2) Running Win XP Pro
3) No OC (c'mon, it's a lappy!)
4) All manufacturer default drivers

So, at this point, I pick up the stupid thing and start working on it. I bust out my dusty 'ol Windows install disk and try doing a repair install. The computer gets to 25% of the way through reading the hdd and reports that a portion of it is unreadable, and that Setup cannot continue...

Next, I restart, and do a full format/reinstall thinking that this will hopefully nuke the problem. I format and the install begins... I enter all the info: cd-key, timezone, network info, etc... everything seems just dandy... and then I get an error: "Unknown Hard Error" and again with the

The error was an alert w/ just an OK button, and another error window underneath with cancel/retry options that said "Error copying system file xxx"... if I hit retry, it'd just go back to the same error... if I hit cancel, it'd move on to the next file and give me an error on that file. I don't remember which file exactly the problem began with (not sure that it's all that important anyway).

I guess my question to you guys is: based off this info, do you all think it's a bad install disk, or a corrupt HDD?

Thanks in advance for any help or insight you've got.

At first glance, it sounds like the HD is crapping out, because the problem started before using the install disk. If you know what type of HD it is, you can try running the appropriate diagnostic software for it. That should give you a pretty good answer.

stool said:

At first glance, it sounds like the HD is crapping out, because the problem started before using the install disk. If you know what type of HD it is, you can try running the appropriate diagnostic software for it. That should give you a pretty good answer.

Click to expand...

I thought about that too... the only problem is, we can't seem to find all the cd's, etc that came with her lappy. I'll check Acer's site to see if there's any type of hdd diagnostic tool on there.

Thanks for the reply!

*edit*

Another thing that's got me a bit worried. Maybe 3 weeks ago, my wife spilled beer on her lappy. It was powered off at the time, and we cleaned it as thoroughly as we could with a towel and compressed air. At that point, we let it sit to dry out for around 24 hours. The next time she turned it on, it POST'ed fine, but made a series of beeps at us... it sounded like almost one continuous beep, but broken up by very short pauses.

Since then, the lappy's been fine. No complaints from the computer, nothing funny, no overheating (aside from yesterday). My wife's been using it primarily for surfing the net and playing WoW... so it's not like she rarely puts any stress on it... WoW can be a system hog.

Just thought I'd throw that little bit of info in there too.

Thanks again!

www.ultimatebootcd.com has a boot disk with most disk diagnostic apps. You will need to run one of the system info apps to find the brand of harddrive that is in your lappy. Then run the apropriate disk diagnostic app from the disk. This will tell you if it is the harddrive that it is the problem.

Will do. Thankee for the linky Kendan.

*bump/update*

I was actually able to install Windows last night. I made the boot CD and, upon firing up the lappy, I booted strait into Windows Setup... from there the installation restarted and went smoothly. Huzzah!

Now for another problem. WinXP isn't seeming to recognize the onboard WLAN... and I can't seem to get it to auto-detect any incomming wireless signal. Any tips??? I've just got the 1394 Connection established... and it won't detect any WLAN yet. I haven't tried actually plugging into my router yet to see if it'll autodetect LAN... but I was curious if any of you all have had much experience w/ this.

I know this question is best suited to another forum, but I thouht I'd chance it here first.

Thanks again guys!

I would still run the drive diagnostics on the hard drive and do a memtest on the memory.