What I Learned After An Assumed Hard Drive Crash - Part 1 of 5

Diagnosing the Cause of a Broken Notebook PC

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, my PC mouse stopped responding. Since I use a battery-powered wireless mouse, when the battery power becomes too low, naturally, the same effect occurs. So of course at this stage, I thought I knew how to fix the problem quickly.

With batteries replaced, and resets applied, I still didn't have a working wireless mouse. At this point, I instinctively used the mouse touch pad built into the notebook PC instead, only to discover that this too would not make the mouse pointer move.

Now I knew that the problem might be more serious. Although the Windows display was still present, including the now fixed mouse pointer, nothing else seemed to work. I tried a complete reset of the PC by pressing the CTRL+ALT+DEL keys all at once (often referred to as a soft reboot). This action should have displayed the Task Manager box in Windows. However, still no change.

Now I was sure that the main office PC had a serious problem. Two possible causes came to mind. A:

• Faulty hard drive, and / or ...
• Fault on the main motherboard / system board.

For me, the more serious option was a failed hard drive. Here's why: although I had backups of most files, some of the latest project information was not completely up to date. Also, recovering backups can often be a time-consuming process and time is more valuable than a hard disk.

My next step was to try a complete restart. Since I could not carry out a soft reboot as outlined above, my only option was to power down the PC and restart manually (a hard reboot). On my notebook PC, the first stage of a complete restart could be achieved by pressing and holding down the power button until the PC switched off. After a couple of seconds, the PC switched off as instructed.

I waited 30 seconds to allow the memory chips to fully empty (assuming that they were not faulty), and then switched on the PC again to complete the second stage of a complete restart. The HP PC boot-up screen appeared as normal, but the boot-up sequence would not continue past this point. Two instructions mentioned keys F8 and F10. During various power down / power up re-tests, I discovered that neither of these two keys worked as suggested on the HP boot-up screen either.

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