HDD causing laptop to short out?

my SDD died and I decided to upgrade to a MK3008GAL for cheap. I tried to connect it to the laptop with the original ZIF ribbon, which didn't fit. I then tried using the cable that it came with (originally from a Zune). Now when I start the laptop, the power light flashes and it won't turn on again until I remove the power source/battery, and press the power button several times. Connecting the SDD (which is screwed up, not even recognized by the BIOS) with the same ribbon allows the laptop to turn on.

I've isolated the problem to the harddrive but was curious if there were any obvious fixes to this sort of thing. I attempted to cover the metal below the ribbon with tape and paper to prevent any shorting there, but that didn't work.

Any insight is welcome!

The harddrive:


The ribbon:

 

I have this exact problem (well exact same hardware anyway).

I bought the Linux 8Gb SSD Aspire one back in October, and have since been around the houses trying to get it working nicely.

Story so far (for the short story / position as of now, skip past this list):

A. I first of all bought an 8Gb SDHC card, and used it with Linpus to expand the storage space available to me - seemed to work fine.
B. Wasn't satisfied with Linpus, so put Ubuntu 8.10 Ibex on it. This took some working out, as I was a total noob to linux and USB booting.
C. Ubuntu was slow to boot, and could have been faster to run, so I bought and installed an extra Gb of Kingston DDR2. All was working well after this, but boot times were still around 90 secs.
D. After tinkering with Ubuntu a few times to try to increase speed / boot times etc... I'd had to do clean installs of the whole OS 3-4 times. In this process, I had attempted to get XP onto it, but this was turning out to be a big no no. I still haven't managed to get XP on, due to the HDD issues I'm about to mention.
E. The SSD began to perform worse and worse each time, and eventually wouldn't format at all to put a new OS on. I tried a number of different ones, and its operation was intermittent. I came to the conclusion that SSD's were unreliable, and that I'd broken mine.
F. I bought a 30Gb 1.8" HDD (Toshiba MK3008GAL) off ebay, and installed this. It was detected, and all seemingly worked well.
G. Reading about success with Mandriva 2009 here, I installed this onto the Toshiba drive. It's performance was good, booted quick, and operated very well for about 4 weeks.
H. This past week, a number of issues have become predominant, and I now believe that this HDD is also broken too.

The symptoms now are I believe pointing to the HDD being broken, and include the following behaviours:

* The OS boots intermittently, when no obvious changes are made. On one 'turning-on' the Mandriva boot progress bar will freeze at around 5%. Turn off, and then back on, and it boots fine (if a little slow).
* The HDD is detected intermittently by the BIOS. Similar to above, turning off and back on sometimes remedies this, but sometimes doesn't. There may also be a link to the power status. That is, when it is running off battery, there seems to be a higher liklihood that it will boot.
* When you do get onto the desktop, it is hit and miss whether it will run smoothly. The hard drive is making frequent access sounds (maybe every second), which sound like it is beginning to whirr up, but then loses power before it can do anything.
* In firefox, there were constant long freezes (30-60 seconds) when loading content. If you waited, they usually came out of this mini-freeze (the mouse still tracked). If the mouse froze too, then the whole laptop was frozen, and you had to do a hard-restart.
* LiveCD OS's work very well from USB, when the HDD is not detected by the BIOS. If the HDD is detected, even the LiveCD struggles to run smoothly.
* I tried numerous times reinstalling the OS, and they all typically freeze during installation, usually whilst attempting to format the HDD. I've also (yesterday) flashed the BIOS to 0.3309, and still no luck.

Therefore, I think this HDD is f***ed, and something is not liking fixed disks.

My question really is, as I've had two drive failures under similar circumstances, is it something I'm doing wrong, or could my Aspire possibly be faulty?

Could there be an overheating problem??

Could I have selected an inappropriate HDD in the Toshiba??

Anyone got any idea about this, or seen anything similar? (As I mentioned, removing the HDD totally, and running off LiveCD on USB; the performance is spectacular. It's only when introducing the fixed disks that problems ensue).

 

I would be looking for a way to try and boot from that hard drive with a different machine. I understand this could be difficult to impossible since the drive uses a ZIF connector. Maybe there is such thing as an adapter that will connect to a SATA or IDE then you could try a different machine. Good luck.

 

Thanks donec.

I notice in your signature, there's 'insydeH2O setup utility' or something. What's that do? Does that give more options than are initially presented in the BIOS??? Only the standard BIOS is extremely limited in what you can control.

 

Sorry but I have no idea.

 

Halleluha!!!

I think (repeat think) I've solved this problem. Only initial tests so far, but they look good. I'll let you know if it reverts to playing up as discussed before.

I disassembled the netbook, intending to return it to factory setip (i.e. back to original SSD and no extra RAM). Plus, if it still had problems at that, I was going to try to return it to acer and try my best to get a fix or refund.

But... in the process, I noticed two issues.

1. There was a lug under the Toshiba HDD pushing onto the back of the drive. I'd placed a piece of foam over this to cushion it, but as it still looked like it was pushing / squeezing the drive, I took off the foam to give more clearance. There was also another L-shaped lug touching, which I cut off entirely using nail clippers. So now there is more clearance, and no pressure on the drive. (Note: I think this fix may have helped, but was not the main culprit).

2. On removing the ZIF cable, the ends looked a little messy to me. On closer inspection, the contacts near at either edge seemed to possibly be touching each other (or close to touching), and I was not happy with them. So, I used a very fine screwdriver to scrape between them, ensuring they were isolated from one another. I then cleaned both ends (with spit! sorry i was in a hurry), and wiped down the ends in a longitudinal fashion, so as to remove any dirt or debris. I'd suggest not wiping across transversely, as this will encourage crossing over the metallic parts and causing shorts.

So, what I think was happening was that the power supply to the drive was intermittently shorting possibly due to drive vibrations, and this was causing the drive to restart (this is what was causing the ticking / whirring noise I was describing). As this was happening whenever, randomly, it was proving very difficult to install anything, or even format the drive.

Hope that helps.

To the guy in the original post. Prob best to try buying a new ZIF cable if this fix doesn't work.