A very weird hard drive problem

Posted by robertfeduniak@msn.com on July 13, 2006, 2:41 pm

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I have a Sony Vaio VGN-FS550. It is a great machine except for the
following indiosyncracy that it developed a week or so ago:

The hard drive is under the left front of the keyboard base (facing the
machine). When I start or restart the machine normally I get the error
message: "lsass.exe: The requested operation failed." However, if I
press lightly on top of the keyboard above the front edge of where the
hard drive is located, it boots normally. I have reseated the hard
drive several times, and the same behavior occurs like clockwork,
depending reliably on the presence or abasence of slight thumb pressure
in one particular spot. I would welcome any theories.

Bob Feduniak

Posted by Barry Watzman on July 13, 2006, 3:24 pm

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It's not necessarily the hard drive.

Just because you are applying pressure there, the problem could be in
the computer itself and not the hard drive. When you apply pressure, it
distorts the case and applies (or changes) the mechanical stresses to
the entire laptop. I'm not questioning that applying stress seems to
fix the problem, but that doesn't mean that the point of action of the
stress is the hard drive.

LSASS.EXE is part of windows and is a critical security file. But you
can't take such error messages too literally as to what the actual cause
of the problem is.

There are things you can fix, and things you can't. In this situation
the first thing I'd do is try to run a memory diagnostic (memtest or
memtest86). If you have problems, remove all unnecessary memory, and at
the very least reseat all of any installed memory modules.

robertfeduniak@msn.com wrote:

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