What I Learned After An Assumed Hard Drive Crash - Part 3 of 5

Removing the Hard Drive 

Next test: I imagined that if I removed the main hard drive, that the PC motherboard / system board should display an error message that the hard drive was missing. This wouldn't necessarily tell me which component was the culprit, but it would get me closer to a solution.

So again, I powered down the PC, removed the battery, and removed the hard drive. Removing the hard drive this particular notebook PC was a simple job:

• Remove two screws to take off the plastic cover.
• Remove another screw anchoring the hard drive in place.
• Then gently slide out the hard drive from its connection points. Since this hard drive was mounted in a kind of caddy with a grip strip of plastic to use, this step was an easy task.
• Again, I took particular care not to touch anywhere near the hard drive connection pins, and carefully placed the hard drive on a safe surface away from the area in which I was working.

Next, I re-installed the battery, reconnected the mains supply and switched on the PC. To my surprise, there was no visible change in the boot-up display sequence.

I would have expected that the key chips (BIOS) on the motherboard should detect that the hard drive was missing. To me this suggested that something on the motherboard was faulty. More importantly, the results of this test also suggested to me that the hard drive might not be faulty. If that was true, good news indeed!

At this stage, what I really needed was to install another known working compatible hard drive that also contained the Windows operating system pre-installed, into the HP notebook PC. However, I didn't have one available. This suspect notebook PC used what are known as SATA hard drive connectors and the spare hard drives that I had containing an operating system used the older IDE interface. Although IDE to SATA converters are available, the process is often not straightforward.

A Visit to the Computer Store 

So my next step was to visit a local PC specialist to ask them to install a compatible known working SATA hard drive into the suspect PC, and / or to test my suspect hard drive. The result of that step was for a specialist to perform some quick checks on the suspect hard drive.

Nevertheless, at the time of testing, the technician said that he couldn't detect the key information on the hard drive, suggesting that the hard drive was indeed faulty, but that this was only an initial quick check and that he would need more time to carry out a full diagnosis, and could I book an appointment to bring the PC in another day?

I thanked him for the offer and returned to consider options. I couldn't wait for 1 to 2 weeks, so on the return car journey, I had another idea.

Where to Go From Here

To review Parts 1, 2, 4 and 5, use the links in the navigation box on the right.

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