My workstation's hard drives are like that. They take a good 20 seconds to fully spin up from cold, so invariably the first boot attempt fails. Nothing at all wrong with the drives, though.

Sounds like you need a format... Or maybe two to be one the safe side [wink].

Or maybe even a new power suply.

Does the SMART tool let you check the error log? I've gotten temperature warnings before on my shell server during summer heat-waves that prevented the BIOS from booting properly (as a "critical error" still persisted in the drive log), but after a reboot it proceeded like normal.

Make sure all the raw readings are within range; usually if I get write errors I'm okay but read errors signify your disk is about to go tits-up.

Quote:
My workstation's hard drives are like that. They take a good 20 seconds to fully spin up from cold, so invariably the first boot attempt fails. Nothing at all wrong with the drives, though.

Curious, I had suspected this might be the case, but the disk has never lost the race with the BIOS before.

Quote:
Sounds like you need a format... Or maybe two to be one the safe side.

Or maybe even a new power suply.

I was going to do a format, but I've just completed the full-blown 5-step WinXP scandisk and it didn't pick up any errors. If the scan had even detected a single bad sector then I'd have reformatted the disk. How would I go about checking the power supply? From the looks of the laptop power supply(and battery) I'd assume everything just runs off(hopefully stable) +12V rail, unless they've managed to tuck a transformer inside the laptop that defies the laws of physics [smile].

Quote:
Does the SMART tool let you check the error log? I've gotten temperature warnings before on my shell server during summer heat-waves that prevented the BIOS from booting properly (as a "critical error" still persisted in the drive log), but after a reboot it proceeded like normal.

Make sure all the raw readings are within range; usually if I get write errors I'm okay but read errors signify your disk is about to go tits-up.

The tool I'm using(DiskCheckup by PassMark), doesn't let me view the log, but the export of results doesn't show anything untoward:

SMART ATTRIBUTES:

ID	Description                         Raw Value	Status	 Value	 Worst	Threshold
---------------------------------------------------------------
1	Raw Read Error Rate                   0   	OK       100	  100	  51

3	Spin Up Time                          3776ms	OK       81	  53	  11

4	Start/Stop Count                      286 	OK       100	  100	  0

5	Reallocated Sector Count              0   	OK       100	  100	  11

7	Seek Error Rate                       0   	OK       100	  100	  51

8	Seek Time Performance                 0   	OK       100	  100	  11

9	Power On Time                         224608	OK       100	  100	  0

A	Spin Retry Count                      0   	OK       100	  100	  51

C	Power Cycle Count                     135 	OK       100	  100	  0

BF	Gsense Error Rate                     55756	OK       95	  95	  0

C2	Temperature                           52 C	OK       82	  64	  0

C3	(Unknown attribute)                   86741568	OK       100	  100	  0

C4	Reallocation Event Count              0   	OK       100	  100	  0

C5	Current Pending Sector Count          0   	OK       100	  100	  0

C6	Offline Scan Incorrect. Sector Count  0   	OK       100	  100	  0

C7	Ultra ATA CRC Error Count             0   	OK       200	  200	  0

C8	Write Error Count                     0   	OK       100	  100	  51

C9	Off Track Errors                      0   	OK       100	  100	  0

DF	Load Retry Count                      143 	OK       100	  100	  0

E1	Load Cycle Count                      225462	OK       78	  78	  0

FF	(Unknown attribute)                   0   	OK       100	  100	  51

Although saying that, the temperature does look like it might be of concern as I think the HD shutoff is about 60, I think a strip-down and rebuild might be in order, although I'll be damned if I know how to disassemble it, let alone put it back together [smile].

Thanks for the help guys.