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I've been having some trouble with my computer for a long long time!

I have a Lenovo 3000 N200, with a 100 GB Hard-disk. I've always had trouble with it. At the start I had vista installed. At some point windows wouldn't boot anymore. I thought that vista was the cause of it, so I found a XP version to use. But that also caused me trouble. At some point windows simply stops working, so I have to format my computer around every 3 months or so - which is a real pain!

At one of those formats, I decided to split my HDD in two partitions, so I didn't have to make backups of all my work. After that I've experienced fewer crashes.

I've also noticed that when my second partition gets filled up so there is only around 10 GB left, windows crashes (while I'm copying the file over). If I delete that new file again, there's no problem.

So after years of trouble, I'm finally pretty sure of what the problem is. I just have no clue if it can be fixed.

So if you have any ideas of how to fix this, please let me know! (There's no warranty on it anymore - had it for almost 4 years)

Additional info: At some point if I tried to defragment it, it would also crash.

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Does the N200 have "Rescue & Recovery"? I'm only familiar with the business class ones. Anyway, the R&R data is stored at the physical end of the drive. I wonder if that is there, but somehow XP/Vista is not aware of it...? (long shot I know.) – skub Mar 24 '11 at 19:12
So what's your question? – Majenko Mar 24 '11 at 19:12
@ skub. Yes there is R&R on it, but I haven't been able to acces that after I installed XP. (at least I don't know how) – RasmusWriedtLarsen Mar 24 '11 at 19:19
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4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Sounds almost as though you have a write protected area on the drive. OEM's occasionally have the drive setup so that there is a portion at the end of the drive reserved for the restore partition and data (about 10G or so.) The drive can see the area, but is prevented from writing to it. Sounds like you reformatted your drive and now it thinks this area is accessible, but when it tries - down you go. Change your partitioning - try and shrink your second partition and either exclude the last 10G or so or create a third partition but don't format or use it.

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up vote 1 down vote

See if there's a firmware upgrade for your hard drive. Backup your data before using it.

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up vote 0 down vote

If you suspect hard drive problems then replace your hard drive. Or at the very least run some hardware testing tools on it.

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

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I think replacing it would be too costy, considering I've lived with it for almost 4 years now. I'll give that hardware testing tool a try! Thanks. – RasmusWriedtLarsen Mar 24 '11 at 19:22
Too costly? I just bought 3 2TB drives for my file server with loose change... (well, not exactly). A 2.5" 160GB drive can be bought for around 35 UK pounds. – Majenko Mar 24 '11 at 19:28
this is a laptop, so 4 yrs. is the right time to replace the disk – jet Mar 24 '11 at 21:11
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up vote -3 down vote

I had a problem like this with my mac osx laptop...I took it to the apple store so I hope I'm explaining what they did correctly.

On a HDD data can be spread all over the disk making it hard for the computer to know how much space is used.

I think de-fragmenting it should push all the data is one side of the HDD and organize it and solve your issue.

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The computer should always know how much space is used - how else can it read the files off the disk? – Majenko Mar 24 '11 at 19:15
I didn't fix it.I had a similar problem as RasmusWriedtLarsen and The guys at apple used disk utility to Repair disk and disk permissions. Maybe there is a equivalent to that on windows? – A Clockwork Orange Mar 24 '11 at 19:24
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