AO 722 Blue Screen - Bad Hard Drive?

Hey, all -

I have a brand new AO 722 (AMD C60 1.333 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 320 GB HDD, Windows 7 Home Premium). It seems to work great, except for one problem.

The machine has BSOD'd a few times. This has occurred mostly during reboots or shutdowns. However, it has occasionally happened during regular use. The error messages that I have gotten are BAD_POOL_HEADER and FILE_SYSTEM, with FILE_SYSTEM being most of the BSODs. They are not OVERLY common, but enough to be worrying.

Doing some research, it seems that both of these may be related to a faulty disk drive. However, a battery of SMART diagnostics has found nothing, as have repeated surface scans (e.g. chkdsk).

Additionally, the Event Viewer in Windows 7 lists several 'controller errors,' with the source field of the Event listed as 'Disk.' (Event ID #11) It found these on \Device\Harddisk1\DR3. It also happened twice with \Device\Harddisk1\DR4, and once with \Device\Harddisk1\DR1.

Furthermore, HDDScan 3.3 simply will not start on this machine - although after I run the command it stays in the Task Manager, it seems to lock up before finishing initializing and displaying the user interface. This makes me somewhat suspicious as to just what kind of interaction it is (or isn't) having with the disk drive circuitry, but I have no way of knowing precisely what's going on.

I still have a little time to return it for a refund or replacement. As such, I ask: what should I do? I'm not sure how much I trust Acer's tech support (I have never tried them, but my general rule of thumb is that tech support tends to be mediocre at best unless you're paying through the nose for it).

For those who may be wondering, the disk itself is a Hitachi HTS54323A7A384 (a Travelstar).

While this may seem a bit overly picky, I don't want the disk spontaneously failing on me or anything like that, especially if it's showing signs of behaving badly already. Any advice on this would be appreciated, as I am on a very tight budget and netbooks are new and strange beasts to me (although highly useful). Thank you!

 

Have you tried running the built in windows disk check tool? It will potentially sort out any file system and partition errors. Depending on how full the drive is it can take a few hours to run but it's worth it. It will also report on bad sectors etc if run correctly.

Simplest way to get a full scan out of it is as follows:
1. Hold the Windows Key and press R to get the run box up.
2. Clear the contents of the Run box and type in "CMD" without the " marks and press enter.
3. Once the black box (command prompt) pops up, type in "CHKDSK C: /F /X /R" without the " marks and press enter.
4. You'll get a message about the drive being locked and asking you to schedule the check on the next reboot, press Y for yes and press enter.
5. Shutdown and restart your computer, a complete CHKDSK scan will interrupt your usual boot procedure and will thoroughly check your drive for file system errors etc.

The command line arguments used above are as follows:
/F tells chkdsk to fix any errors on the drive if possible
/X tells chkdsk to unmount the drive first (can be useful if more than one partition is involved)
/R tells chkdsk to check and flag any bad sectors in the partition.

At the end of the scan (if you keep an eye on it before windows resumes loading) there will be a minor report on what chkdsk has repaired. There may even be a log in the Windows folder on your hard drive. Failing that, you should be able to add the following command to manually create a log file on your hard drive.

Add a space after "/F" and type in ">c:\CHKDSKLOG.TXT" without the " marks so your whole command looks like the following:
CHKDSK c: /F/X/R >C:\CHKDSKLOG.TXT