W520 shuts off intermittently, no BSOD or shut down

[xhu12]

@ ToddPman: Wow lenovo offered you a new machine as replacement? what did you need to do to get that? My machine is about over  1 month old and I have that random crash since many weeks now. All lenovo offered me is replacement of the Mobo and HD. 

[ghost1410]

ToddPMan,

So I replaced my hard drive and my HD led indicator is now almost all the time off , with old Hard Drive it was all the time on.

Second off all I turned off in all my energy plans option: "Stop hard disk rotation" because I'm not sure if that option is working correctly.

Based on HD Tune Pro after two weeks of work my  HD from Lenovo had 110 of errors to compare with my 4 years old 160GB Hitach HD had 1 error, so I'm sure that HD Seagate ST9500420AS is a total failure.

I'm not sure if this solve my problems but I've tried to replicate conditions to check if there will be any resets so I left my computer in idle states, or on litle load with Firefox Browser on every energy plan and set that after 10 minutes  sleep mode,  repeat this test around 20 times and there was no errors or unexpected resets. 

From my experince I know that HD can make hard to find errors and even resets especially if the HD is corrupted internally.

More I checked my Windows Log once again after all this tests and finaly I don't have any warning , errors or critical errors I have only Information which is perfectly fine.  

I will keep You posted on this.

PS. I'm  really mad that on top notch hardware from Lenovo I have to searching for solution of this kind of problems I bought this laptop to be 100% sure of performance and stability...

I have Toshiba Tecra M9 for more than 4 years and never had any problems at all.

Let me know if You find out more.

Regards

Tomasz

[ToddPMan]

@ xhu12: My machine is only a week old today, so it is within their 21 day replacement period. That said, if we can't get resolution to these issues, I think we should all be entitled to a full refund as this is not acceptable for what is suppose to be the top machine on the market.

@ ghost1410: What HD do you replace with? I read on another thread, that the HGST 7k500 ro 7k750 are good options or the WD Scoprio Blacks. Please do keep us posted of your experience now that you have the new HD in place.

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-New-system-s-disks-have-quot-reallocated-...

I'm tempted to ditch the Seagates altogether, but I want to send the bill for the HDs to Lenovo! I've also considered just buying a pair of SSDs, but they can't take advantage of TRIM in RAID 1 from what I understand, so I'd be loosing out on some of their speed advantage, so I"m not sure if the higher price would get me that much more speed than a pair of 7200 HDs. Is anyone else running the RAID 1 with the 520?

My HD LED light does fash on/off most of the time. Right now, with just Firefox and Event Viewer running, it flashes every couple of seconds or so to various degrees of length.

Since I'm still within my full refund period, I'm only going to be willing to put up with this troubleshooting for so much longer before I ditch Lenovo all-together and try to find a better mobile workstation... just not sure where I'd go next for top-of-the-line performance and reliability. Not many laptops have RAID 1 options available, which I need because I'm a day trader and have to have 100% up-time (or as close as reasonably possible). I could always just have a second computer, but that is not very mobile.

Thanks for everyone's continued troubleshooting and suggestions.

[xhu12]

Hi Tomasz,

Thanks so much for testing with another HD, I was pretty suprised that Lenovo rep offered me a new HD even without to verify whether my HD is really defect or not, I already thought they either wanted to demostrate that they are customer friendly or they know there is a problem with the HD! However, they probably shipped me the same HD, so I will see whether the "new" Hd is crappy or not, if it turned out crappt again, I probably would ask a SSD as replacement.

[ToddPMan]

@ xhu12 is your HD also showing Event ID 55 NTFS errors (The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume Windows7_OS) in the Event Viewer? I did what it suggested and ran chkdsk on my drive and it reported back, among other stuff:

Cleaning up 270 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 270 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 270 unused security descriptors.
Security descriptor verification completed.
22521 data files processed.

CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
34314072 USN bytes processed.

Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the
master file table (MFT) bitmap.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

I then ran a Lenovo Device test on the hard drive and where before I ran chkdsk this would have filled the Event Logs with NTFS errors, and sure enough they are still there... I will be curious to run these tests on the new machine when it arrives to see if they come back clean.

I'm still tempted to put in a pair of these regardless:
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Scorpio-Internal-2-5-Inch/dp/B004I9J5OG
I'd love to actually put in a pair of SSD in RAID 1, but because TRIM does not work with a RAID array, you have do do a lot more maintenance to keep them speedy, plus the drive cost is so much higher, I think I'll wait for TRIM to be available with RAID arrays and just go with the HDs for now.

[ghost1410]

@ToddPMan

You should know that in RAID mode it's enough that one of the hard drives is corrupted then whole system is not stable.I used my second hard drive WD5000BEVT-24A0RT0 which is WD Caviar 500 GB Blue hard drive with 5400 RPM , I checked this with HD Tune Pro no errors at all, my lenovo is working perfectly fine.I left my computer all the time on to check if there will be any unussual activity or errors in Windows Logs. My HD indicator is almost all the time off unless there is some normal actions related to files. After 36 hours of working there is no restars or any errors in Windows Log.You should immediately backup Your files.

@xhu12

If You are using this Seagate ST9500420AS please make copy of Your files ASAP because this HD is really poor quality You can find loads of opinions online about failures of this HD.My was in bad condition after 2 weeks of normal activity and in HD Tune Pro had more than (C4) 110 errors I compared this to my 4 years old HD Hitachi 160GB and this one had only 1 error so You can see this is serious.

It's to early to say that Seagate HD was cause of all problems with random restarts but I can say for sure that my WD hard drive is a lot slower then this Seagate but whole system and computer is working much faster and smoother.

Ok I will keep You posted on progress.

Regards

Tomasz

[xhu12]

Breaking news! It is very possible that the HD is the origin of the random shut-down! I probably just reproduced the random crash I was experiencing more or less intentionally for the first time!

I followed the suggestion by ToddPMan and tried to ran windows chkdsk right after boot, guess what, my computer froze at about 14% at step 4/5, "verifying file data", during the frozen, no responses to key board and the HD led on the monitor frame is lighting up condinuously, since the OS was not yet loaded, the computer just stuck in this situation, I can't do anything else but by pressing the power button for 5 sec, just like Windows 7 use to do when it's loaded

At the moment, I strongly suspect that the random crash I experienced sofar comes from the faulty haddisk. It is really a shame that a 2000$ brand new high end bussiness laptop is shipped with crappy HD! Regardless, whether the HD is true reason for my random shutdown or not there is no excuses for faulty harddrive on a high end thinkpad!

[xhu12]

Hi all! I can confirm now that the system hang during chkdsk is repeatable. I tried 3 times now and the system hangs every time at the same spot:

14% verifying the file data (4/5)

and at the exact file number (107075/429040)

When chkdsk  reaches this spot, the system hangs, keyboard dead,I waited for about 30min and the file number was not moving at all, and the computer behaves exactly the same as the random shutdown during under windows 7: screen frozen, keyboard/mouse dead and the HD LED on the monitor frame lights up continuously. Only difference is that I have to push the power button, that seems to be taken over by Windows 7 during the windows operation.

My harddrive is a 500GB ST9500420AS, so if you have the same HD, yout random shutdown may be caused by the harddrive, as many users already pointed out in this thread, this HD is anything but reliable.

[xhu12]

Hi ghost, can you confirm that you haven't had any random shutdown since you replaced the ST9500420AS with your old HD?

[ToddPMan]

Thanks for the update xhu12. My chkdsk completed successfully unlike yours, but I'm still getting a ton of NTFS errors in the Event Viewer. I have not had a crash in 3 days now, the longest period yet, but I'm guessing it just has not hit that spot on the HD that is bad... and I assume clearly something is not right to be getting the NTFS errors.

The only difference this past three days (when the system has not crashed) is that I have not kept my trading software (NinjaTrader) up and running. It has been running for all the previous crashes... make me begin to wonder about that now as well, although everyone was telling me it is not a software problem... and I guess I still have the NTFS errors no matter what...