I have an Acer Aspire 5002WLMi

About a month ago I had some hard drive problems. I had a 100 GB Toshiba MK1031GAS Hard drive (4,200 rpm). It died on me. I ordered a new one about a week ago. Just got it in the other day. It is a Western Digital Scorpio WD600VE 60GB (5400 rpm).

I installed it just fine. It showed up in the BIOS. I put my Win XP Pro CD in, got through the partitioning stuff fine. Then it went to the formatting part and it crashed on me. Thinking maybe my battery could have died, I charged the battery over night, and tried it this morning. And got the same thing.

I have had trouble in the past with my laptop crashing occasionally before, but do not understand why. My fans are working fine.

I obviously have not been online at all or been connected to anything, thus meaning no viruses that could cause anything to screw up.


A thought came to me about an hour ago: Could the different rpms have anything to do with it??? But then I have to question myself again and ask why it also did it earlier.

D-A-L is awesome, you guys have been quick and accurate with me before, so I am looking forward to what kind of feedback I get. Thank you in advance.

I cannot get Acer's download site to load. Do you have the latest BIOS?

The drive speed might be an issue. Have you tried running off the AC adapter?

Also I note that laptop has heat issues regarding the bottom fan/vent.

Can you lift it off the desktop or get good ventilation to its' underside?

http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/for...=7293&areaid=7

I went to that site earlier this year, went to download a driver.

As far as I know, I have the latest BIOS. May I ask what difference it would make if I have a new version?

Yes, I have tried running off of AC adapter, and nothing changed.

Propping it off the desk does not help.

Thank you for your quick reply

The closest they list to your model is Aspire 3000/5000

http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/for...ords=&areaid=7

BIOS' are usually updated to handle new hardware as things change over time. My only thought was a BIOS update might have addressed the HDD speed issue if there is one. If nothing else a faster drive will produce more heat. Heat is the leading cause of computers simply stopping/freezing.

Are you recommending I return the one I have, and get a HD of equivilant or less rpm than my original HD?

Also, how do you install this BIOS driver w/o having an OS?

Not necessarily. As you say you had earlier problems maybe it is something else. Again I would suspect heat but other things could be getting hot as well. Any chance you have a cold environment you could try it in?

When you say the old drive died what happened? Is it really dead? What happens if you try to install on that drive?

Another idea is you could create a GParted Live CD and boot it to try and partition the drive:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Another idea is to create a KNOPPIX Live CD and see if it will load without crashing:

http://www.knoppix.org/

The BIOS installs from a boot floppy or CD.

ok, that makes sense... It is currently pretty cold outside... actually very cold as in around zero degrees.

What are these xxx Live CDs ... what do they do??

its seems like these Live CDs are for Linux? Are they?