[PLUG] Laptop Hardware Troubles?

[cshanahan@comcast.net]

Hello all,

I hope everyone is having a great holiday season.

If possible, could I get some insight from the list regarding a hardware problem
I'm having with my --I can't live without it!-- laptop? Its a Toshiba Satellite
2435-S255 running WinXP Pro and SuSE Linux 9.2 Pro. Last evening the laptop
started acting strange, shutting down without warning, over and over again. I
thought Windows was messed up and decided to copy a saved image of my
Windows partition back to the NTFS partition--as opposed to reinstalling
Windows. I image all my partitions from time to time so I can recover from
crashes without too much trouble.

Anyway, when I tried to write to the hard drive the laptop crashed again after a
few minutes of writing. I tried various file system tools on both the Linux (Reiser
and Ext2) file systems and the NTFS file system using Knoppix (v.3.7) and
SystemRescueCd (v.0.2.15) but did not detect any errors, such as bad blocks.
The laptop will run all day long without problems, provided I don't try to write to
the hard drive. For example, I can start the laptop using Knoppix and it'll run fine
all day. As soon as I try to write to the hard drive the laptop crashes.

This afternoon I picked up a new hard drive and installed it. Put a copy of WinXP
Pro in the CD-ROM and restarted the machine. After a few minutes of formatting
the machine crashed as it has been doing. With that in mind, the problem
doesn't appear to be with the hard drive.

Has anyone has similar problems with a laptop recently? Any ideas what the
trouble could be? I've never had to have a laptop repaired and I'm worried about
spending a fortune. I don't even know where to take a laptop to get fixed. I fix
all my own PCs so I'm not in the habit of using PC repair shops.

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

TIA and have a great new year!

Chris/CMS

PS -- Sorry if this message doesn't wrap correctly. I'm stuck using Comcast's
Web-based e-mail for the moment.



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