Question: I have this ‘new’ Dell work laptop for less than a month now. Something happened today that happened once on this laptop just recently before and also rarely on other computers that I’ve used.
I was working when I noticed that applications couldn’t start and when I looked at my hard drive indicator light on the laptop didn’t blink at all: it seems that my hard drive wasn’t responding. A forced reboot was required and afterwards the Windows Event Viewer has nothing more to say than: ‘The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. …’.
What causes this shutting down of my hard drive? I was doing low performance tasks and I wasn’t moving it around. This laptop uses an SSD but I had this happen on computers with traditional hard drives as well, although not at this frequency.
Answer: There are a couple different issues you might be having. We’ll assume your indicator light is working correctly.
Your hard drive could indeed be suffering technical difficulty, which might need a S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) check just to make sure. On the flip side of that you could have a piece of software doing damage. Trying booting into safe mode and see if you get the same problem.
The power supply could be failing, meaning your HDD isn’t getting enough power to function correctly or your motherboard could be having issues.
Check the safe mode solution. If not try a S.M.A.R.T program such as PassMark. I haven’t used this specific application and can’t find the one I usually use, but any problem a Google search will provide you other options.
One other easy to check issue might be your hard drive cables (IDE or SATA), which you can replace without an issues.
Should these not be your issue you might want to get your power supply and motherboard checked by an engineer.
As a precaution you might want to backup your stuff. Don’t want to be cursing yourself later if your drive is slowly deteriorating.
Techlogon – Some further reading if you wish.