Freeze, stalls at start up, factory reset = problem still occurs

Bingo ... there you have it

if you look at the "Attribute" tab... and the "Current Pending Sector Count" you will see the RAW value which is hex is 21... which mean 33 (in Decimal) sectors that are waiting to be remapped as bad or good based on how the Drive firmware is programmed to work on it..

This is a sign of drive being corrupted and would fail in the long run... I would suggest to get this replaced if under warranty...or buy a new harddrive and reinstall windows on it (whichever way you prefer to do it)


What "Current Pending Sector Count" means

Count of "unstable" sectors (waiting to be remapped, because of unrecoverable read errors). If an unstable sector is subsequently read successfully, this value is decreased and the sector is not remapped. Read errors on a sector will not remap the sector immediately (since the correct value cannot be read and so the value to remap is not known, and also it might become readable later); instead, the drive firmware remembers that the sector needs to be remapped, and will remap it the next time it's written.[27] However some drives will not immediately remap such sectors when written; instead the drive will first attempt to write to the problem sector and if the write operation is successful then the sector will be marked good (in this case, the "Reallocation Event Count" (0xC4) will not be increased). This is a serious shortcoming, for if such a drive contains marginal sectors that consistently fail only after some time has passed following a successful write operation, then the drive will never remap these problem sectors.

If you also look at the read test .... you will see it failed at 10% .. thats almost at the beginning of the disk sector... which is where your boot files and core windows files will be located... and hence the loooooooooooong time read those sectors..

Is there anyway to fix the HDD now? A fix or anything to get the laptop running temporarily?

You could try and do a low level format of the HDD but that not a sure shot solution.

If its data that you want to retrieve.. you can use the parted magic live CD and mount the drive and probably save as much data that you can

Ah... I'll just get it replaced. I didn't think that problems like this would occur in less than 12 months from purchase and I always back up my files on an external hard drive.

Thank you sooooo much for all your time and effort in helping me! Really appreciated it and learnt a few things too.

Well a word of advice ... just do a google search "samsung hn m101mbb problems" and the first few link would give you an idea... the problem with this model... its not you that is having this problem...

Though these are almost a year old threads at forums... it could be that samsung might have upgraded the firmware of the HDD... not sure...

If you feel the issue is resolved.. please mark the thread as Solved and REP those helped.

Thanks for the advice.