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General discussion

Inspiron 1525, Defective SATA Controller?!?!

Nov 10, 2009 5:22AM PST

it seems ALOT of people have been posting the same issue of their inspiron 1525 repeatedly gobbling up new hard drives unexplainably. faulty motherboard wiring of the SATA controller seems to be the most likely explanation, unless there's some step or oddity that i'm missing here.

A friend of mine has an inspiron 1525, freshly out of warranty. and it had a hard drive failure. before consulting me (her first mistake) she brought it to geeksquad and their diagnosis was a new drive and with labor the bill would be $300ish. fortunately she declined, as i told her this was a very cheap/easy fix and i'd take care of it. Ordered a new SATA notebook drive and i expected to simply pop it in, re-install vista, some chipset/lan drivers, and be cruising within an hour.

after placing the new drive in and booting a fresh vista install from the setup DVD, vista setup told me the drive would likely fail soon. since it was brand new and well packed i figured this must be an issue of not booting windows setup in IDE NATIVE mode. I poked around in BIOS setup and couldn't find IDE native mode, but instead, turned off flash cache and set AHCI back to ATA mode. i figured this was the same thing, a legacy compatibility mode that'd allow windows to set up smoothly and that windows would automatically set it back to the optimal SATA setting once we were up and running.

this did not help.

another thread had recommended the possibility of checking the new drives jumper and capping it to SATA 1.0 speeds. This seems plausible, and i am yet to try this. but i'm going to soon and will report back my findings. that doesn't explain the first hard drive (which was factory OEM) failing, but since laptop hard drives DO spontaneously fail (especially when their owner is a 17 year old girl) i'll give it the benefit of the doubt.

advice anyone?? again, this seems to be a RECURRING problem with this model and i'm yet to find a hardened solution from other threads/and or other sites.

Discussion is locked

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i forgot to mention
Nov 10, 2009 5:40AM PST

that windows setup completed entirely, but the drive clicks/pops/grinds during usage. after two days of running, windows is now bombarding me with "your drive is going to die soon" messages every few moments. the painful sounds it's making confirms this statement. =[

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Just for data
Nov 10, 2009 8:19PM PST

The move to lead (Pb) free solder has made electronics more fragile. I see many carrying laptops around and this plus the move to Pb free designs means many machines will last just a few years. Seems that in the eco-rush they didn't see the down side.

While your story sounds like both the drive and connection may have failed there is another issue that is worth noting. Many can't install Windows XP to a SATA drive and they call the machine bad. Go figure.
Bob

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sounds like...
Nov 12, 2009 3:11AM PST

weak connections in the SATA controller would confirm my suspicion that they're defective... on a post warranty system, does this mean i have a very expensive frisby on my hands?? is there nothing i could do short of intense (and unrealistic) motherboard surgery?

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Just one question.
Nov 12, 2009 3:15AM PST

Do you own a solder iron and use it monthly or more? If so then WHY NOT? The downside is that you'll break a busted board?

The SATA connections are all of some dozen points to reflow. Does not sound intense.
Bob

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excellent point, bob
Nov 12, 2009 6:17AM PST

you've inspired me. i'll need to rule out every other possibility first...hard drive #3 (and a different model) will need to fail on me before i consider soldering.

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Thank you.
Nov 12, 2009 11:19PM PST

Some get testy when I bring up that working on a dead machine won't break it. It's already broken.

Fair warning. Gross stuff below.


Think of how they teach surgery. The students work on dead animals and people. The same goes for repair work. When I gave classes in basic computer upkeep, upgrades we used dead machines to let people change a hard drive or card.

This way when they dropped a hard drive it was no loss since it was dead. The student learned from that experience without killing a good drive.
Bob