W520 shuts off intermittently, no BSOD or shut down

[ghost1410]

@ToddPMan

Sorry, to hear that Your Lenovo had a crash once again  I have great confidence this is because of HDs failure.Let me know what did You find out from HD Tune Pro.

My W520 is ok and no more restarts or any other crashes.

I hope failure Seagate HD is the answer but Im not sure yet for 100%, so we will see.

Regards
Tomasz

[ThorsHammer]

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ToddPMan wrote:
CRASH: Longest stretch since I've owned the laptop, 5 days, but there it went. Was not at the machine when it happened so not sure if it froze first. I'll look into taking the HDs out of RAID so I can run HD Tune Pro against them individually.

My new machine should arrive Friday.

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Do you have GPU hardware acceleration turned on in the browsers you use?

[ToddPMan]

@ThorsHammer: I'm using Google Chrome with default settings. I don't see that setting anywhere?

[ghost1410]

Yes I have default settings in Firefox and IE so everywhere GPU acceleration is on.

Im pretty sure this is not because of software.

I have question about CPU when I turn on Maximum Performance plan in Power Manager  my CPU is in Maximum Turbo mode, default it has 2300 MHz and it should go  in Turbo mode up to 3300MHz.

When I open CPU-Z I see that CPU has only 800MHz for most of the time and is going up to 3300MHz when it's needed and back to 800MHz shouldn't be 2300MHz for most of the time?

Do You have the same situation with Your CPU ?

Regards

Tomasz

[ThorsHammer]

Supposedlt Google Chrome is turned off by default.  See About:Flags in Chrome.

For the rest of you, I can tell you for a fact IE9 and FireFox 5.01 added a lot of instability to my machine and many of the symptoms described here with GPU acceleration enabled.  After I disabled it, I haven't seen a single crash in nearly 4 weeks now.  And that was after 4-5 BSOD's and a complete power shutoff in a 24 hour period.

There's no question in my mind this was the prime cause on my machine.

[ToddPMan]

Ok, removed the Seagate HDs and ran HD Tun Pro on them connected to a different machine. Results:

Drive #1: Warning on Reallocated Event Count. Current 100, Worst 100, Threshold 30, Data 220, Status Warning. All other items in Health show Status of OK. Running Error check but that will take some time over USB 2.0. Then I'll try HD #2.

[xhu12]

Hi all,

I replaced the HD with the identical seagate HD sent to me by Lenovo. Reinstalled most of the stuff I need. Running smoothly so far so good. Strangely the HD tune pro still show 100(both current and worst) counts of C4 reallocation event counts, I wonder whether this is something we really need to worry about. However, the disk passed the windows check disk without any problem (the prvious HD hangs during the check disk). However, I still need to wait for a few days before I can tell that this solve my problem for sure, the longst random shutdown free period I had with last HD is about 8 days. So wish me luck, I will post again as soon as someting happens.

[ToddPMan]

HD #1 showed now errors on the error scan in HD Tune Pro and a clean Windows Error Check (chkdsk). The only warning was the aforementioned Reallocated Event Count. Waiting for the RAID to rebuild to take HD #2 out and run the test on it.

In the meantime, picked up a couple of these as possible replacements:

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Scorpio-Black-Mobile/dp/B004LR1RPK

Thanks all.

[ghost1410]

@ThorsHammer

Maybe in Your case that was a cause so I don't want to dissagree with You.

I understand Your statement but I'm Web Programmer I work with IE9 , Firefox, Chrome, Safari on daily bases it's hard to believe that two major web browsers are adding instability to workstation for more than 2000$ even more from my perspective this is unexceptable.

What Hard Drive do You have inside Your W520?

@xhu12

In HD Tune Pro with perfectly fine HD I have current and worst parameters 200 , but rest is 0 and status is OK in every parameter.

In (C4) row You have to watch for Data paramater because this mean that Your hd is reallocating data because of bad sectors or other internall errors. I had after almost 2 weeks 110 errors in Data Column.You will have warining when this kind of errors show up.

@ToddPMan

You have the same errors like me (C4) Reallocated Event Count this error is very often pre-failure condition of HD so I'm pretty sure this is Your problem with stability.

My parameters after two weeks for old Seagte HD is

current [100] worst [100] Threshold [30] Data [110] Status [Warning]

All other parameters status [OK]

New HD paramaters

current [200] worst [200] Threshold [0] Data [0] Status [OK] 

All other parameters Status[OK]

Let us know what will You find out with the second HD.

This is my fifth day without any problems with my W520.

Regards

Tomasz

[ThorsHammer]

120GB Intel Series 510 SSD in the primary bay, 80GB Intel Series 310 mSATA SSD in the PCIE WWAN slot, and a 500GB Hitachi 7200rpm drive in the Ultrabay III hard drive adapter.

And by the way, the Seagate 750GB 7200rpm drive I recently tried crashed totally after 3 weeks.  I will not be using or purchasing their crap any longer.