Is this a hard drive dying issue?

NotRite · 13 Nov 2017

Had a friend call me the other night asking for help about her PC. She said it would not boot up. It tries, but it just sits there "spinning" and not loading. She said she had Windows 10 and has had it since last year. I get there, start the PC and immediately I see it's booting up in Windows 7. It would never finish loading. I tried booting to safe mode, safe mode with command prompt, startup repair with a disc but could not ever get the PC to completely load any OS whether it be Win10 or 7. It would load a screen that said "Safe Mode" in all 4 corners but it would not load the desktop or anything. By the way I got to "Safe Mode" by pressing F8, which is Win7 and not Win 10.

I took the hard drive out of the laptop and connected it to a SATA/IDE converter and connected it to a separate machine. When it finally showed her hard drive on my PC, it showed 3 partitions. When I clicked on each and every one of them it showed that there was not anything on them!?

Googling this issue has not provided any answers either so if anyone has any suggestions or ideas they will be greatly appreciated!

Thank you

Plankton · 13 Nov 2017

I don't have a answer for you.....but ran into the exact same problem with a friends laptop....it was a HP laptop. I pulled the HDD and connected it to my desktop via case docking station (love that feature on my case). Once my PC found it, it had 2 partions......C/D partitions where the D partition was the OEM factory image. Both were completely empty. I couldn't get it to boot up with anything I had or could find on the web.

What I ended up doing was just formatting the laptop using HP's method of entering the OEM factory recovery setup and then just let it do it's thing. Turn of PC....then turn it on and keep tapping the F11 key until it enters the HP recovery software.

dalchina · 14 Nov 2017

Hi, you can check the disk:
e.g.
a. use a program such as Hard Disk Sentinel (trial) which will give you a very clear indication (assumes you have the disk as an external disk to a functioning PC)
b. get Kyhi's boot disk from the top of the software and apps section here, create a bootable disk, boot the original PC from it and use HD Tune

If the disk is physically ok, you may have suffered some corruption of a critical part of the file system or partition structure, in which case a recovery program may help if you are very lucky.

I hope your friend routinely uses disk imaging as we so often recommend. Recovery to a new disk would then be quite straightforward.

kimkl · 14 Nov 2017

Yea sounds like when i tried dual-booting for the first time many ehh some years ago

ended up with just the boot loader more then once but still sux to learn it the hard way, last note MAKE SURE DRIVES ARE EMPTY

amazing how disc failure some times make the "cup" seem empty so check to be sure and do not trust MS when it claims no info is to be found we all remember the missing drive/drive letter some months back yea that was fun. so run a check disk or what ever you have handy the hdd might come to life again or like The Guru above i hope she uses backups i constantly have between 3-5 or 10 yea a bit much backups just in case and cloning a SSD does not take to long best of luck m8

NotRite · 14 Nov 2017

Thank you everyone.

dalchina....um no she did not /does not do any backing up whatsoever. First thing I asked her. LOL. I can almost guarantee you she will from now on. Thanks for the other advice. I will download Sentinel and give that a shot this weekend.

kimkl....thank you for your reply as well. I have had a similar experience to what you mentioned a few years back myself. I have been backing up to 2 external hard drives for the last 5-6yrs ever since!

Thanks to everyone who replied. I knew this was the go to place for me to confirm what I what I thought was happening.