8.9-inch Acer Aspire One said to have hard drive flaw, distaste for U2
By Donald Melanson 
posted March 26th 2009 7:27PM
posted March 26th 2009 7:27PM
It looks like any 8.9-inch Aspire One owners out there may want to refrain from playing music full blast through the netbook's speakers for the time being, as some users have found that it can have the unfortunate side effect of completely trashing the hard drive. According to reports on the HardwareCult forum, the problem only affects Aspire One netbooks with standard hard drives, not SSDs, and it arises when the right speaker causes enough vibration and / or magnetic interference to throw the hard drive into a tizzy, leading to a whole host of errors and even some potential data loss. Apparently, the problem was first discovered when someone played U2's "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" at maximum volume, which has since conveniently proven to be an effective tool for reproducing the problem -- not recommended, of course. No word if the new album has any effect.
[Thanks, Tigre]
[Thanks, Tigre]
im on my Acer Aspire One right now, but i rarely listen to music through its stock speakers and when i do use it to listen to music i use my room stereo connected to my computer with an audio jack, so i havent had this problem thank god.
This happened to a friend last night. She was listening to music and a loud squeal showed up (seemingly from the drive). She powered off the machine, and trying to boot got her the XP startup screen, then "Unmountable boot volume".
Short form for the fix was to get Recovery Console to boot from a USB stick, then "chkdsk /r". The machine seems to be "fine".
(booting recovery console from USB is here: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=20983&st=20&p=142073&#entry142073)
The _REAL_ issue behind this has NOTHING to do with the electromagnetic forces from the speaker. It DOES have everything to do with overloading the 5v power rail while the machine is on battery power. The "loud mp3" comes into play because that's an easy 'final straw" to sag the 5v rail. It turns out that this was discovered back in January. Check out the post from "jackluo923" here, and follow the resulting references:
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=12758
Wrong. The hard drive problem occurs both under battery power AND when the battery charger is plugged in.
Playing a 720p video on the Acer Aspire One could overload the CPU AND GPU, making the power consumption higher yet nothing happens... the bangs and bass of a song makes the hard drive go berzerk EVEN UNDER BATTERY CHARGER POWER.
i solved it poorly though!
here it goes : the problem is with the right speaker which is a half a centimeter to the hard drive.
tried isolation but wouldn't stop the shaking. so i used the control panel to cancel the right speaker's volume and cranked up the volume with no blue screen . the con is that it's now mono.