DST short test failure

paulbelk

Distinguished
Jan 10, 2008
3
0
18,510
New lappy suddenly started going haywire. Let me explain & give some details.

New laptop is an HP Compaq 6830s.
Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 2 (32-bit)
1.8 GHZ Core 2 DUO CPU
4.0 Gig Ram

Toshiba MK2552GSX Hard drive - 250 GB

Recently I left my laptop on overnight & when I tried to get back on it was running very slowly.
Any program that I opened would not respond.
I shutdown & rebooted & still the same problem.
Restarted to run diagnostics. (f8)
Gave me a disk utility to run diagnostics & received an error called - DST short test - failure.

Reading online about this problem i've found out that many people have had this same problem & a lot of them were cured with uninstalling & re-installin some program like Windows Defender or Mcafee.

Right now I am on my laptop on the administrator account for several hours & no problems at all. All other user accounts have the same problem though.

My biggest question is how I can tell for sure that the hard drive is failing before I put in a new one & restore from backup? Toshiba doesn't seem to have a diagnostic tool I can use.

ANY sufggestions would be greatly appreciated.