Z60m crashed during factory restore [ Edited ]

[Kashmir]

Hi, I attempted a factory restore on my Z60m and followed the steps for putting in the different R&R and PR cds.  I put in product recovery disc 3 and then the computer crashed.  When I turned the laptop back on it told me I would need to restart the process, I attempted to do so and it said it couldn't find the service partition.  When I boot the computer with the Rescue and Recovery disk it attempts to do the first step of the factory restore process but it cannot complete the process.

Please help!  Is there anything I can do?  Let me know if there is any additional information that might help out.

[andyP Community SuperMod]

Kashmir, welcome to the forum,

what was your reason for running a factory restore; just for fun, it was about time, system was crashing or hanging?

Have you made any changes to your hardware recently; added memory or whatever?

My reason for asking; in my experience if a system crashes during a factory recovery it's quite often down to a hardware component being defective. It could also mean thet the recovery discs are defective.

[Kashmir]

Thanks Andy.

My reason for the restore was that the system was frequently crashing and hanging.  I cleaned it up immensely and it was still running at just half of its potential.  

No hardware changes have been made to the laptop at any point.

[andyP Community SuperMod]

It sounds to me that you probably have a hardware problem sorry.

The problem is now to find out which component.

Firstly grab a copy of the Hardware Maintainance Manual, it may be useful later.

Secondly, you need to run some tests on the system, create a bootable cd of PC Doctor and let it run all tests. There are further programs which could be used, but this is a good place to start.

Let us know the results

[Kashmir]

Parallel Port Interface: Failed (Wrote 00H, Read FFH)  There were about 20 occurrences of something similar to this.

IDE Interface: Failed (Sector block 118571008 to 118587391 failed verification)

These were the only events in the log.  Are there any specific contents I should look up?

[andyP Community SuperMod]

The fact that the Parallel Port Interface failed is no worry whatsoever, because there isn't one on the Z60

Otherwise it seems that maybe your hard drive has a problem.  I suggest you test the drive on it's own using the diagnosis software offered by the manufacturer, they all offer one, or simply use the cd image of Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test. Even if you don't have an Hitachi drive, it will tell you whether or not errors are present.

Let us know how you get on.

[Kashmir]

I ran the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test and it said "the operation was completed successfully."  I wasn't able to find detailed information but it reported no errors and I ran the advanced test.

[andyP Community SuperMod]

Strange, PC Doc reports errors and HDFT doesn't.

Try removing and then replacing the hard drive, how to, and then run PC Doc again.

[Kashmir]

I removed and replaced the hard drive and ran PC Doctor and everything passed.