Laptop HDD won't boot to W10 OS - is readable as ext. drive

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
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Dear reader,

TL; DR
I am combining two (nearly) identical laptops into one functional one, but am encountering a hard drive problem. It is not bootable to its W10 OS (no Windows logo), but it is detectable and readable when used as an external drive (via HDD dock USB connection to other PC). It appears to be the drive and not the device.

The problematic HDD comes from a defective laptop. I have transferred it into a barebones (nearly) identical laptop; one without HDD, RAM, OS, etc.
A different W10 bootable HDD does work on the ‘new’ laptop after it auto-reboots 3 times (I think 32bit, the problematic HDD might be 64bit). The problematic HDD also does not work on a different laptop, where the other HDD does work. This leads me to think there is a problem with the W10 boot environment / image perhaps.
The W10 OS was installed on the same laptop type (minor differences such as CPU and MB version LA-7781P vs LA-7781P, maybe other minor stuff), so I thought this would be optimal given software and drivers issues. But alas.

I would like to avoid have to reinstall everything again. Fixing the issue and changing the OS product license key to the new laptop would be ideal. If it turns out I have to format and reinstall everything, or there is a lot of troubleshooting involved, I might get a cheap SSD instead.

Below is background and additional information, no need to read if not interested.

Bit of background info: the hard drive originates from a Latitude E6430 laptop, which was severly damaged due to a chemical acid spill (pH of 3). Despite being turned off, it caused significant short circuiting, massive corrosion effects and unusable parts. Cleaning with IPA did not make a difference; certain components on the MB were untraceable (despite use of MB schematics) and uneconomical for MB component repair.

The damaged laptop and contents of the HDD are of no emotional value to me; I had been gifted the laptop and converted it for Repair Café use as testing device and knowlegde search hub for use during repairs for fellow repair collegues. To avoid having to use (and risk) personal devices.
It had a clean W10 install, performed on that laptop. I was only able to use it two times, before the acid incident (>1 year ago).

I had written off the entire laptop, but recently decided to check if the HDD still works. Before doing so, I cleaned off all leftover corrosion with IPA and checked if any internals were damaged. The drive seemed to boot up and spin without issues when used in an externa HDD dock via USB connection to a different PC. I was able to read and navigate the drive without issues.

I then purchased a similar ‘body’ E6430 laptop; a refurbished laptop without HDD, RAM, OS etc., thinking I could transfer all working components and save a bit of money. I intend to use and offer it up for multipurpose use during Repair CafĂ© events again, this time without hazardous materials around of course


Thank you in advance.

Kind regards,
JB

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it’s not a broken BCD?

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Thank you for your response. I will have to look into that, as I’ve never performed this check / repair before.
Just a technical question to start off, how would I have to connect the problematic HDD to a working system? I suspect a USB connection won’t work? If needed, I could perhaps use the DVD tray connector, as I have one of those 22pin sata extension cables, somewhere, I think could use in case the USB won’t suffice.

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I’ve only ever done it on a computer, with the boot drive connected as it normally would be, but booting off an DVD or external USB boot drive, to repair the boot.

like the windows install medium, then the “repair” thing, instead of install?

it’s been a long time

presumably there are ways to have the target drive, be an external, then use a different windows system to fix it, but never tried that

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Could it be that one laptop was set to UEFI boot mode and the other is on Legacy mode? Worth toggling the setting on the “new” device to see if the drive will then boot.

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Unless I’m missing something (I am not familiar with this kind of BIOS GUI), it doesn’t appear to work when switch to UEFI. It prompts a “File System Not Found!” warning message when attempting to “Add Boot Option”. No boot options are listed, in contrast to Legacy mode (USB, HDD, Diskette, etc.). When booted using UEFI, it will say “No bootable devices detected”. When in Legacy mode, no message is detected, but it seems to ‘hang’ between the BIOS screen and the Windows boot logo (I can see the underscore character for a few second, switching to different lines as well).

No change when 'Enable Legacy Option ROMs" is unchecked, same for prompting “Load Defaults” in the Boot Sequence.

Info: BIOS version A24
Video on the BIOS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY3dgyn4mcQ

Followup question on the Boot Configuration Data thing. I cannot use a bootable Ubuntu USB to fix it, I guess? I’ve been trying to find some info on that online, the only mention I see is someone stating that the Ubuntu BCD is basically a chckdsk and not the same repair tool as BCD via Windows.

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I don’t know of any Ubuntu tool that will fix Windows broken boot files, if that us the problem.

If windows is working, linux (grub on ubuntu) can detect the windows install, and add the working boot option to grub’s list of bootabke OS’s. So dual boot, with Windows already install, can Add windows to the grun options.

If the boot files in windows are wonkey, and you are not dual booting, then I would say, try to fix them with a windows install drive or similar?

I am presuming you only have 1 drive in the machine, and wish to have windows as the only OS.

If the windows install, simply needs registering with the motherboard, then installing linux to another drive/partition, which installs grub, might additionally register the windows install with the motherboard as well, but would be a longer way around.

You could use a Ubuntu USB drive, and try to run the “fix-mbr” tool, but I am not sure it works on a liveUSB system; never tried


Perhaps might work? But never tried

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instead of complicating things with a linux stick just make a windows 10 install stick and then, choose repair/trouble shoot and use the cmd to fix the problem

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Totally agree

(that’s what I meant, anyways
)

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Thanks for thinking along. I was just asking, because I had the Ubuntu stick lying around. But I’ll get started on the MBR / BCD when I’ve got the time, probably the next few days.

Thanks again, all. I will update.

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Turns out I had some spare time today. Using a Windows ISO USB doesn’t work. It will boot to the Install environment, but that is an empty blue screen with only a mouse pointer to interact with. After some searching online, it turns out more people have had this issue. One of the causes could be:

  • Legacy vs UEFI boot via USB (some say it will require UEFI boot for this Windows USB, some say it must be in Legacy, soo
)
  • Legacy mode ROMs not enabled (or whatever the equivalent setting is called, sometimes CSM it think?
  • Secure boot not disabled
  • Bootable USB not enabled

I tried all different combinations of the aforementioned settings, but to no avail. After some more searching, I came a cross a few topics where people stated that a corrupted Windows environment and/or drive might conflict with the Windows USB, causing it to not show the ‘normal’ install environment and be stuck on that blue screen.
I did the following accordingly:

  • Tried other USB ports: all work
  • Verified the Windows USB boot works on my main PC: it goes to the install environment without issues
  • Checked initial disk information in Ubuntu environment: size an volumes detected; disk is OK; 2491848 bad sectors
 I’m guessing that’s not desirable.
  • Tried to copy files via the HDD dock with USB connection to my PC, but gives fatal hard disk error warnings. I can see the folders, just not the content.

I haven’t tried chkdsk and its repair options while connected via the HDD dock to my PC.

I suspect I will have to use the linux environment for MBR / BCD repair attempts, if that would even help at this point. I am not familiar with using the terminal, aside from using it once to change the keyboard backlight timer from 30 seconds to 12 hours (funnily enough, on this laptop type, just the one that was damaged).
If I follow the instructions as listed in post #3 (in particular, the 11x upvoted one with lilo), will that be a good starting point?

What are the risks? I’ve read it could risk messing up the partition table, but that could only relate to the method in the 5x upvoted answer. I will take answers to these risks and further steps as learning points for future scenarios like this.

I’m guessing formatting the drive won’t fix the issue. I read that bad sectors are circumvented in case of a formatting, not repaired. And I’m also suspecting that the ~2.5M bad sectors is a bit much for a usable drive, even after reformatting, but I have little to no knowledge on storage tech.

I’m seeing some suggestions on using software to detect the bad sectors (FDisk, Spinrite), but that is not within the scope of this thread.

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If you mount the drive on another computer, via USB or whatever, copy the data you need off, then the risk is pretty minimal?

if needed, one could even reformat/ reinstall?

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I performed a MBR repair using a Ubuntu USB (Windows USB didn’t work), using the following program and commands:

sudo apt-get install lilo
sudo lilo -M /dev/sda mbr

This seemed to have fixed it, as after rebooting back into the WIndows environment I finally got a Windows boot logo.

It would, however, not continue. The loading wheel kept spinning for quite some time. After a few reboots it would start the Automatic Repair process. The first 40% of stage 1 went quite fast, but it would soon slow to a meager 1 repair every 2 seconds (469760 total). The ETA went from 2h to 4h to 20h, and leaving it overnight for 8h resulted in only a 9% progress (49% stage 1, 17% overall) and a continuously increasing ETA (now up to 68h already).

I stopped this process, as I suspect the drive may be severy damaged / dead after all, unfortunately. I might try a reformat just to see what happens, but I suspect it the drive won’t be very usable anyway.

1 Like
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Glad you made a bunch of progress
sorry to hear it stalled

yeah, sounds like drive is knackered, and probably best to to a full, low level format, and let the drive remap bad sectors, and maybe have some workable sectors left over
 though if failing, it’s not gonna get better only worse.

welp, props to you, for keeping poking at it, and trying things to see what’s wrong with it

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Additional note:
Like mentioned in an earlier post, I could not retrieve any of the data on the drive via the Windows (10) environment of my main PC. I could only read the folder names, but it would give a ‘fatal hard disk error’ prompt when attempting to dig deeper in the directories.
I decided to try it via the Ubuntu USB, and for some reason I can see and open/read nearly all files on the drive, of not all. Except for the one I wanted (Google profile). I managed to make a manual copy-paste backup of the relevant files.

I might try the low level format somewhere in the future (I’ll have to look into the process for that, never done that before), but for now I will consider this drive not suited for reliable use. Its only 500GB, and nearly 10y old anyway.

For now, I think this thread has been resolved.
Thank you all for your insights, information and thinking along.

Kind regards,
JB

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The problem with directly transferring a drive to another machine is that since windows 2000 installs have been machine specific.
Trying drive in a different machine even if nearly identical only results in a blue screen.
System repair function formats and reinstalls the os from the recovery partition. But even then its a gamble.

You dont have that trouble with linux ( at leas I never had any problems).