I'm having problems with my ei systems 4417 laptop.

Several weeks ago my laptop failed to start up one day and as a result I took into my local pc repair shop and I was told that the hard drive had failed. I then bought a new 80gd Seagate hdd and installed it. All was going fine until I was part way through updating windows and drivers when I got a blue screen crash. These continued after 30-40mins of activity and I put the problem down to the wrong drivers. I tried everything, including reinstalling windows and starting again, until I finally gave up and took it back to the repair shop. They then informed me that the new hard drive was also failing and advised me to send the hard drive back to the shop or manufacturers to get a replacement.

Does anybody have any ideas as to what could be causing the failures? I can hear the fan running and the air vents seem to be clear.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

You might have bad luck and or a tech who uses HDD failure as an answer to all mysteries.

Seagate has it's own diagnostics that you can run: SeaTools Desktop

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/


Are you using a Microsoft XP CD or are you trying to reinstall an EI Systems disk?

Do you have a driver disk from EI Systems?

I am using an EI systems recovery cd and yes i do have a drivers cd but i also tried downloading latest drivers off the web.

The website i bought the second hard drive off have emailed me today to tell me that the hard drive i sent back was faulty and they are sending me a new one but i'm worried that the same thing is going to happen to this one. I just think its strange that after one hard drive failed the brand new one also became faulty after an hour of use. I'm concerned that there is a more serious underlying problem.

I can think of no hardware connection that could cause hard drives to fail. In general a faulty hard drive will fail almost immeadiately or else only after very long years use.

It is a strange coincidence but I can see no connection to other hardware.

My concern was the proceedure for installing the EI systems recovery cd. Do you have a manual on how to do this? Many manufacturers have specific instructions and certain limitations as to what their disks will or won't do. Do you see anything in the EI manual as to changing hard drives on the computer?

I found this: Ei System Recovery

This is the option that you want to try:

System Recovery - Quick format: this option will erase your hard drive including your personal files. Windows®, supplied applications and drivers will be reinstalled.


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There is a brief section on using the recovery cd in the manual but when i did it the last time i didnt have to do anything as it was an automated process. there are no notes in the manual about replacing hard drives or any other components.

Let us know how the new drive works out.

I would try the System Recovery - Quick Format install if you were not already.

The drive will need to be formatted.

I have installed the new hard drive and reinstalled windows. i have also updated windows to service pack 2 etc and it has been running fine for two days now without crashing. I have also done a seagate desktop diagnosis. The hard drive and IDE controller all came back without any faults. I just need to reinstall the drivers now. Any advice on how to do this?

Glad to hear the good news!

Which drivers are you needing?

From the Applications folder, you can now install either drivers or tools. An example layout is shown below, tools or drivers shown maybe different from your computer.

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I have the drivers cd provided. I need to install the graphics driver, audio driver, modem driver and a driver for one other unknown device.

I was wondering how i should go about installing them. e.g. manually using the exe files or using device manager to go find and install the drivers automatically.

Also is there any particular order i should do them in?

I would install them from the Ei Systems files (or disk). Use either the .exe or setup.exe however it is labeled.

I see the Audio; Modem; and VGA (video) listed at the web site.

Unless you have added third party hardware then these drivers should work.

There is no particular order. Just check that each has succeeded before trying the next.

Is there any ID on the other Unknown Device?