# Hard drive LED stays on, system hangs

## audiodef

I recently repaired the power jack on a laptop. It seems to work fine now, except that twice now I have had to force the machine off because the hard disk access light comes on, stays on, and the system slows to a halt. I ran mhdd off sysresccd, did a low level erase and ran scan with remap, but there is apparently nothing wrong with the hard drive. 

What are the reasons this could be happening?

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## NeddySeagoon

audiodef,

Low level formatting of hard drives is destructive and has been disabled in the drives since people did it by accident a few times. That was before drives got be be as big as 4G.

There has been a problem involving drive access. A lot of bits are involved in that, the CPU, RAM, hard drive controller ...

On laptops I've seen this caused by a dead/dying battery. Operate the laptop with the battery removed for a few days or longer if possible.

Run memtest from a liveCD. If it finds problems, it need not be RAM. Tell us what it finds. Hard errors may well be RAM, random errors are probably something else.

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## audiodef

Thanks, Neddy. I'll investigate as per your advice, as well as try leaving the battery out.

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## audiodef

Just ran memtest from sysresccd. The screen just sits there and does nothing. No keys I press (such as c or esc) do anything.

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## NeddySeagoon

audiodef,

Thats probably a bad sign.  Maybe try another version of mentest or play with USB legacy support in your BIOS.

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## audiodef

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Thats probably a bad sign.  Maybe try another version of mentest or play with USB legacy support in your BIOS.

 

I'll do that.

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