T60 KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR

Question

Hello,
I've got an 8'ish year old T60 with all original components except the fan. I've been getting a KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR for about two years now. I understand it's typically due to a failure of the HDD or the hard drive connecting cables. In more rare cases it can also be a memory/processor/motherboard. It's annoying, but manageable. Sometimes it happens 3 times in two hours... actually it just restarted on me in the middle of typing this! Other days it doesn't restart for days. But it has gotten progressively worse.
I've run memtest to check the RAM - no problems. I've ran multiple HDD tests - no problems. I've run disk repair utilities - either no problems or it reports it fixed all issues. The CPU temperature never rises above 73 degrees, and it rarely goes above 65 degrees, so overheating is not an issue. My total available HDD memory has not decreased at all (still at the original 88.2GB), so it doesn't seem like an imminent HDD failure. I've had no noticeable data loss. Sometimes when it restarts it launches the disk repair utility, does the repair and then boots fine. Other times it gives odd messages, like there is no drive to boot from, or a fan error, but after a reboot there is no issue.
With the experience of the T60 users on the forum, I wanted to ask, am I looking at a HDD failure, or a HDD connector cable failure?
If the HDD fails, my plan is to purchase a HGST Travelstar 7200rpm SATA III 32MB Cache 1TB.
If the cable fails, I have no idea if it's possible to replace.
I routinely backup all my data, so that's not an issue. So far this is more of a nuisance, but it seems to be getting worse by the week. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Hello.
This definitely sounds like bad sector issues on your HD, and since it's been going on for a
long time, it's way past due to swap it out. In a T60, there is no cable, the SATA port is directly
attached to the motherboard, and if this was a failure in the soldering, you'd have much more
serious issues at hand.
Have you checked your drive for bad sectors registered in the SMART data of the drive itself?
Running all kinds of tools to repair it, including chkdsk only blocks those sectors, which will
continue to multiply after repairs. This is only a certain grace period you get when they start
appearing and a drive swap is absolutely recommended at the first sign of such failure.
The fastest way to view the SMART data is to fire up a Linux LiveCD and view the HD status
in the Disk Utility there, or you can use f.e. this tool in Windows. There are many others.
HDTune
Give it a whirl and see if your problem doesn't lie in a rapidly deteriorating drive.
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