HDD Shows Bad In Laptop But Shows Good In Other Machines

[AlaDes]

A few months ago I diagnosed a bad HDD in a laptop and replaced it with a new WD Black. I received the system back again a few weeks ago and after running my HDD utilities on it, it showed the HDD was failing again. I performed an RMA on the drive through WD and just got the new one in and installed into the laptop. After trying to perform numerous OS installs and failing, I decide to run my HDD utilities on the replacement drive WD sent me. Guess what, another bad drive!

After three drives in the same system and all of them showing delays and bad sectors, I decided to test the two I have now (the old one and WD's replacement for the new one I had put in it) in another system. Both drives passed with flying colors!

Has anyone here ever ran into this problem before? Diagnostic utilities that show that a drive is bad in one system and perfectly good in another. If so, what ended up being the problem?

Btw...This is on a Dell Inspiron N7110

 

[Timeflood]

My flow of logic would point not to the hdds, but to what connects to them. Bad sata controller? Bad board? This is not from experience, as I have never ran into that problem. Only a logical guess.

 

[SilverLeaf]

What utilities are you using to diagnose the drives? I find I get the best results from a bootable version of the manufacturer's utilities, or gsmartcontrol from within a live linux environment (with the caveat that SMART data raw values here may be less meaningful). Either option will allow you to run the on-board diagnostic self tests though.

It is possible that you could have a flaky hdd cable or controller causing problems as well.

 

[AlaDes]

I am going to try and flash the BIOS on this system to see if that fixes it. I've had corrupt ones before that caused weird problems, but yes, I am leaning towards a bad MB

 

[MikeLierman]

I also take the hard drive out if it shows failing and slave it to my workhorse and run the full HHD test (takes a few hours). Never seen it show bad in one and good in another, it's always bad in both for me.

 

[brandonkick]

Have you swapped out the IDE/SATA cable? They can go bad and cause all kinds of hell.

 

[JustInspired]

Have you swapped out the IDE/SATA cable? They can go bad and cause all kinds of hell.

The only SATA cable I've seen (and replaced) in a laptop was in a MacBook.