Bleh, ich bin fail. :[ I'm sorry. I don't have any laptop hard drives to check it against, and it didn't seem to like not having it present (I've been able to boot a desktop system from CD-ROM before, having removed any hard drive).
I don't think it's the fan or any sort of overheating. When I tried using that System Rescue CD, it would always hang at a regular spot--when scanning for USB and PCI devices, I believe. I disabled hardware detection and it loaded fine. Overheating wouldn't allow for all the other things I had done but then cause it to become unresponsive in a regular, predictable manner. And memtest seemed to find nothing wrong with the RAM, and the processor seems to be just fine.
Hmm, it might be the hard drive, with that noise resulting from a broken needle... but I could still read from the hard drive (at least the partitioning and file table, and at that time that I had attempted it). I wonder if the lag it had was from trying repeatedly to access data on the hard drive, with some sort of error-handling design to have it check repeatedly until the data was read, thus making things from the disk take their sweet time to load. Also, the read errors might be a result of the disk further degrading. If the needle is broken, it's gone, and that hard drive won't get any better.
Although I wonder why that USB/PCI scanning was when it froze... Dammit, I really wish I had a spare laptop hard drive to test it.
no subject
I don't think it's the fan or any sort of overheating. When I tried using that System Rescue CD, it would always hang at a regular spot--when scanning for USB and PCI devices, I believe. I disabled hardware detection and it loaded fine. Overheating wouldn't allow for all the other things I had done but then cause it to become unresponsive in a regular, predictable manner. And memtest seemed to find nothing wrong with the RAM, and the processor seems to be just fine.
Hmm, it might be the hard drive, with that noise resulting from a broken needle... but I could still read from the hard drive (at least the partitioning and file table, and at that time that I had attempted it). I wonder if the lag it had was from trying repeatedly to access data on the hard drive, with some sort of error-handling design to have it check repeatedly until the data was read, thus making things from the disk take their sweet time to load. Also, the read errors might be a result of the disk further degrading. If the needle is broken, it's gone, and that hard drive won't get any better.
Although I wonder why that USB/PCI scanning was when it froze... Dammit, I really wish I had a spare laptop hard drive to test it.