W520 shuts off intermittently, no BSOD or shut down

[ghost1410]

@ThorsHammer

That's true there is a lot of bad reviews on the net about Seagate , personally I always use Hitachi and Western Digital  hard drives but my machine came with this Seagate 500GB which was total failure from the begining and causing restarts and nothing but troubles to me.

At this point after five days since the replacement everyting seems to be fine.

Regards

Tomasz

[ToddPMan]

UPDATE:

Well folks, my new machine arrived today, so I quickly pulled the HD and run HD Tune Pro against the HD and even then I still get Warning on Reallocated Event Count. Current 100, Worst 100, Threshold 30, Data 3, Status Warning. All other items in Health show Status of OK. So it seems that all of the 4 Seagate drives I have from Lenovo have various degrees of Reallocated Event Count.

I'm also still seeing a couple of NTFS Errors. I'll begin to install updates, etc. and see how things progress. Not too optimistic that any of this is actually going to resolve this problem...

I'll likley go ahead and swap out the HDs with the WD drives when they arrive, but first I'll let this new machine run for awhile and see how it goes, unfortuantley could be 8+ days before failure, so I'll be holding my breath.

[xhu12]

Hi all,

So far so good since I changed the HD with the identical one was in the machine before.

I also researched a little about the reputation of the default seagate harddisk in the w520. It seems to have a okay everage rating, however the ratings themselves are quite extreme, either a customer likes it very well or dislike it totally, in many cases I read so far, the reason for total dislike is the broken sectors on the disk.

I hope my computer will be fine and ToddPMan, congrates on your new machine, hope it won't let you down as the old one!

@ghost: How long is your machine running without random shutdown? Are you still using the HD from yout old laptop?

[ghost1410]

@ToddPMan

Yeah , congratulations on Your new machine, let us know if it's stable.

But it's really unfortunate for You , because of this HDs,  You will see this numbers of errors in Data column  rising within hours and days the same like me and many others before. But I wish You luck

@xhu12

it's a fifth day and fourth night for my Lenovo working 110h without any problems or restarts.

Windows Logs clean.

Yes Im using my old WD HD because Im 100% sure is  ok.

A wait few more days but Im almost sure that HD resolve my problems with unstable machine.

I ordered this HD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136692

No more Seagate for me that for sure

[ToddPMan]

@ghost1410, I have two of those same HDs you mentioned coming from Amazon. They will be here tomorrow. Do you think it is ok, if I just mirror the new drives from my Seagate drives... should be ok, right? Since I have RAID 1, I figured, I would just put on of the WD drives in at a time and let the RAID rebuild it automatically for me.

[ghost1410]

@ToddPMan

Yes You can mirror the files , that shouldn't be a problem as long as Your old HD's has the same capacity as the new HD's, other wise You can have problems to make RAID working correctly.

I think if You want to be 100% sure You should put Your new HD's togheter make new RAID from them and then copy Your files from old HD's , I know it will take more time but this way You will eliminate any problems from old HD's.

Let me know how everything will work for You

I find this WD Drives very interesting in terms of perfomance and stability.

[ToddPMan]

@ALL: Hey guys if you didn't see this thread, seems to be another person who is blaming Lenovo Power Management Driver and Power Manager for their crashes...and has not had the crashes after removing these... just in case our HDs don't fix the problem, another thing to try. May not be the same exact symptom/problem, but wanted to pass it along.

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-BSOD-on-Sleep/td-p/482845

See the posts by "shan_mcarthur".

[ghost1410]

That was my first suspect thats way I turn off in all my Power Plans option: Stop hard disk rotation because it seems to not work properly... But this is great posibility that this restarts are because of failed power management driver, thats why Im not sure if my HD solved my problems we will see.

Thanks for that solution

[xhu12]

For a long time, I also suspected the power plan driver. So far, I have been using the lenovo power manager and driver since the HD swap. My computer is still running fine, no random shutdowns so far, lets hope it wll stay this way!. I am not quite sure my random shutdowns were really due to the lenovo power manager.

However in my case, my w520 behaved differently, I never have had any BOSD. So the error I encountered was apperently bad enough so the OS decided to power-off without any error dumping. I think we might have a different problem than he does/did.

BTW, I supposed to send my broken HD back to lenovo (they provided a UPS return sticker for the package) so I transfered all my data to the new HD and hooked up the old HD via USB as an external HD and tried to format it before I send it back. However, the windows formating tool always crashed, but was working on other HDs I have tried so far. It looks like my old HD had some serious problem. 

[ghost1410]

At this point after six days and five nights  after HD replacement my W520 is working without any problems or restarts.

I believe in my case that is the solution. Broken Seagate ST9500420AS was causing all my problems. 

Im waiting for info from @ToddPMan because he is going to replace his HD's and if his machine will work well that will be solution for morre machines. 

I will keep You posted on my case

Regards
Tomasz