Lenovo Crapped Out Finally

Purchase the same model on eBay and swap hard drives.

Boot Linux on it, and use cc to copy the disc onto a USB stick.

"cracking the case" is no big deal either. Laptops are meant to have their hard drive bay be servicable without opening the entire assembly. Usually, there is an access panel on the bottom.

ght a replacement. I need to get the data off the hard drive and of course I could open it up and remove the thing and use a USB case to attach it to the new laptop. But I'd rather not crack the case if I don't have to.

% utilization of the hard drive with nothing going on effectively locking u p applications, but occasionally it resumes normal operation. I've been ab le to pull off all my email data files and I believe it just finished copyi ng the Eudora directory with the executables.

take a couple/few days. I'm wondering what could have happened to the dur n thing that it is acting this way. If the problem is actually in the hard drive then putting it in a USB case won't help. I've looked for possible software causes and haven't found anything that seems to work. Heck, even my new machine is having problems with 100% disk usage, but in that case it is because the "System" process is actually moving data. On the crapped o ut machine no data is being moved.

I looked, I can't find an access panel like the previous laptop had. Nothi ng for memory either, the entire back comes off. I guess that's no big dea l. If I can't get more stuff out by tomorrow I won't have a choice.

I like the idea of booting Linux, but there is no reason to believe that is a solution for sure.

Rick

You *are* an evil so and so.

Rick C.

A bad driver causing cache thrashing is the most common culprit for what you describe

Holy crap! I just realize the new machine doesn't even have an opening where you can access the battery!!! Hell, this machine may be returned to Costco. A battery replacement requires opening the case??? I'm calling BS on that one.

Cache thrashing? You mean the cache inside the disk drive or a cache in memory? Did you read the part about nothing going on? By that I mean there is no data being transferred across the interface. It's just busy 100% of the time.

Right now it is working and I"m posting using it. But I'm copying everything off and abandoning it. It has been nothing but a piece of crap for the two years I've owned it.

The new machine fixes a few of the problems of the old one, but adds some new ones of its own. The up/down arrow keys are half size fitting the pair into a single button spot. What Einstein thought that was a good idea? I guess some stylist who never uses those keys. I also discovered (when I found I needed it) there is no pause/break key anymore.

Have you asked the drive?

you can then run smartctl and see how healthy the drive thinks it is (package name is smartmontools)

If the drive is healthy you've got a software problem -

On most portables there is usually an elegant way to change the hard drive if you can find the service manual.

That sort of fault is often an indicator of hard disk about to fail and large numbers of read retries due to uncorrectable errors. Disabling the swap file and/or limping along in safe mode might help a bit. What do basic error diagnostics like SMART have to say about disk health?

You will need to verify that what you have copied is a true copy of what was originally there if there is anything particularly precious on it.

I don't suppose you have any recent backups?

If it is a pending disk failure then putting a modest SSD in as a replacement will give it a new lease of life.

Thanks for the suggestions. I just bought a SSD for this machine, but this is not the only issue with it, just the last straw. I have, not once before, but twice before been ready to replace it and was able to get it working again at the last moment. If it wasn't for the way they cripple modern laptop keyboards and touchpads it would have been replaced over a year ago. Funny that they sell machines with what I want for a bit more than what I paid for the duff Lenovo (it does have a pretty crappy screen) but sell what appear to be the same machine spec-wise but are $200 or $300 more and called "gaming laptops". lol I hate the black color they come in or I would have kept the one I picked up at Costco a year ago. I returned it unopened when the Lenovo piece of crap was resurrected.

My backups are of my data. Eudora doesn't need to be reinstalled and it's much better if it isn't as I would have to go through all the durn tweeks again many of which I don't recall.

One thing I do like about the Lenovo, it warms the case very well keeping my legs warm in the cold winter months. The new HP machine is cold to the touch everywhere on the case and never blows the same overheated exhaust. It's cold like the dead gray eyes of a shark!

If it's a Windows machine and the SMART testing is coming back OK with a recovery disk test then could also be the usual collection of malware/bloatware/startup applications that end up accumulating over the years.

Pull data, wipe the drive, reinstall, and lock that shit down to keep it clean.

The "System" process will sometimes show 100% CPU usage at idle on a Windows machine, this isn't necessarily indicative of anything. The Window's task manager isn't a reliable indicator of actual CPU usage, OP should use a 3rd party app like CPU-Z for stuff like that.

Have you tried making a Linux LiveCD/USB stick, booting into that and running some SMART tests and disk I/O performance tests? If those come back OK then the problem is not the drive.

How exactly would "bloatware" tie up the hard drive 100% for up to hours with no data being transferred across the interface?

Memory leaks, the process allocates but doesn't free every time it executes some repeating call somewhere, slowly exhausts the set of physical memory mapped to the process or processes virtual address space, begins thrashing the disk

Unless there was a driver very recently updated this is quite unlikely. The most common cause of running in molasses is that the disk is on its last legs and the swap file and parts of the OS are having multiple read errors. The OS keeps trying until it gets a copy that error corrects OK (or at least with no *detected* errors which may not be the same thing).

If it is malware related then CCleaner and MalwareBytes (both free) are the tools of choice to try first - although be careful what options you choose or you may zap cookies that actually contain useful and important login details or things on a wishlist you intend to buy later.

MalwareBytes is always worth a try on a machine that is behaving erratically even if the AV showing nothing obviously wrong.

That is a very drastic brutal solution - not least because modern installs tend not to come with a recovery CD. Everything for reinstall is on the hard disk so if that is failing you are dead in the water. Then you have to reinstall everything you had on the machine from scratch and do all the relevant updates to bring it back up to scratch.

If you are going to do that much work you may as well do it on a new machine and get the speed improvement that goes with it.

There was a bug like that a long time ago but I have never seen the generation from Windows 7 onwards give anything other than sensible results. You can generally tell by the hum of the cooling fan and CPU temperature how hard you are working a machine.

I have heard of new machines with the RAM soldered in. Maybe the HD is as well, I wouldn't know because I didn't look at it. I was told.

That virtual memory crap on the hard drive does the thrashing - but only when you try to copy / access large enough files that it has to spool out to virtual memory. IFF you have enough memory there is a simple fix that may restore about half the performance you had and that is to set virtual memory to a ram disk. It still thrashes but clears it very fast and the pc won't let you queue up too many tasks (which of itself can be frustrating)

If it gets to that stage and your data is really important, I would boot it from a Linux live CD (they pretty much all recognise and can work with Windows format discs now) and manually copy the data across to a suitably capacious thumb drive. You never know how close you are to the end when a hard drive starts to get flaky.