Aspire 7552g-6436 frequent random short hangs even in BIOS screens

I bought this laptop in 2011 and it has worked fine till recently. Early on, I added Ubuntu Linux the the existing Windows 7 and all worked fine.

In the last couple months, I am experiencing short (5-15 second) hangs as I work on this laptop. When a hang occurs, the disk light comes on and stays on until the hang clears. It happens frequently, maybe every 20 seconds, usually starts when I click a menu item or press a key.

It happens on both Windows and Linux,same symptom. So I thought I would look in the BIOS. The problem occurs even there, on the BIOS screens, like when I click the right or left arrow to move to a different BIOS menu option, the disk light will come on and the key press won't register for a few seconds (5,10 seconds) then suddenly the disk light turns off and the arrow key takes effect, just like when it happens in Window or Linux.

What could cause this same problem in both operating systems and the BIOS? When I look at the SMART disk report, it says disk is "OK", some bad sectors but ok.

What component could cause this problem?

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jimmy7laptop

When you said the problem happens in bios I suspected it must be the hard drive. It may be a ram memory problem if not the drive. A mem test could be run like this one:

http://www.memtest.org/

You could first try runing a live linux cd/dvd or usb stick which will bypass the hard drive and allow you to see if the laptop still hangs.

Here are some live linux distros to try out:

http://www.linux.com/directory/Distributions/livecd

Ace1024

Thanks for your suggestions.

I ran the MemTest86, took about 20 minutes and passed, no errors.

I created a Linux USB stick and booted from that, ran for 30 minutes. The symptom did not appear. The hard drive light never came on and no intermittent hangs were noticed.

The laptop reads DVDs when I have a OS running, no problem.

So maybe the problem is narrowed to the hard drive, or hard drive controller? I may try to purchase a new hard drive and swap out the existing one. There won't be an OS on the new one but as I mentioned, I noticed delays on the left/right arrow keys in the BIOS, so that would be one simple test I could do.

Ace1024

I did a quick test to give me an idea if I'm headed in the right direction.

I removed the hard drive and rebooted the laptop, and pressed F2 to get into the BIOS. After 10 minutes, could not reproduce the problem. Arrow keys moved to the next menu item immediately, as expected.

I put the hard drive back in and went into the BIOS. The problem immediately presented itself, every few seconds, the arrow key would hang for 5 seconds or so, then the queued-up keystrokes would take effect.

I'm going to buy a new hard drive and copy my data to it and see if that takes care of the issue.

jimmy7laptop

Yes the hard drive must be bad. The bios must be using the hard drive periodically. I wonder if it would do the same thing connected as a usb drive with a usb conversion kit? Most likely. A usb linux stick comes in real handy for testing purposes.

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