how do I know if my hard drive has broken?

sparkiemalarkie

Hi my laptop has frozen on the initial start up screen.
I have tried many of the suggestions on the internet and have finally taken out the hard drive.
The laptop now moves past the start up screen and starts looking for the bootable material.
When I put the hard drive drive in again it freezes at the start up screen again.

Does this seem like a broken Hard drive? How will I know for certain before spending out any money?
thanks

sparkie

NiftyDigits

Spend some money.

Dynamode External Housing for SATA 2.5" Hard Drive £3.59

sparkiemalarkie

NiftyDigits wrote: »

Spend some money.

Dynamode External Housing for SATA 2.5" Hard Drive £3.59

Ah, I've got one of these.
What do I need to do after I have connected my hard drive?

sparkie

tronator

NiftyDigits wrote: »

Spend some money.

Dynamode External Housing for SATA 2.5" Hard Drive £3.59

Did you reply in the wrong thread?

@OP: The first thing you should try is to is to connect it to another working Windows PC (preferably directly to on SATA port) and run a complete chkdsk on that drive.

skiptalker

removing a hard drive was quite a big step for such a small problem i think you should have researched the boot up problem first and tried a few remedies like booting into safe mode to see if it boots up..try some solutions by typing in google your problems and how to resolve them.put the hard drive back in, boot into bios and make sure the hardrive is been seen in bios if not, if bios has the option to find it do so also make sure in the boot sequence the hard drive is first.

NiftyDigits

tronator wrote: »

Did you reply in the wrong thread?

@OP: The first thing you should try is to is to connect it to another working Windows PC (preferably directly to on SATA port) and run a complete chkdsk on that drive.

No. I think they should use it to check if the HDD is working and if it is, to back up or to clone the drive.
Then they can run tests on the drive itself.

Of course if they already had a spare PC to hand they could have tried to connect it to a spare slot.

What made you think that I might have replied to a different thread?

sparkiemalarkie

skiptalker wrote: »

removing a hard drive was quite a big step for such a small problem i think you should have researched the boot up problem first and tried a few remedies like booting into safe mode to see if it boots up..try some solutions by typing in google your problems and how to resolve them.put the hard drive back in, boot into bios and make sure the hardrive is been seen in bios if not, if bios has the option to find it do so also make sure in the boot sequence the hard drive is first.

Thanks , I have googled the problem but can't get to the boot screen. I have tapped f8, f12, 0 taken out the battery and held down the start button for 60 seconds.

this is pretty much my problem
http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f108/toshiba-satellite-l775-stuck-on-start-up-screen-680614.html

grumpycrab

sparkiemalarkie wrote: »

Ah, I've got one of these. [hard drive caddy]

Did you try this? Perhaps you don't have a spare computer to attach the caddy too...?

sparkiemalarkie

grumpycrab wrote: »

Did you try this? Perhaps you don't have a spare computer to attach the caddy too...?

Yes, I can try it but haven't yet> I will give it a go after dinner

sparkiemalarkie

3 errors found and fixed but still not moving on from the opening screen,

grumpycrab

sparkiemalarkie wrote: »

3 errors found and fixed but still not moving on from the opening screen,

With disk in caddy? And can see file system? That's a good time to make a copy of any important files.

As you're having no luck booting what is, I assume, your Toshiba Satellite, probably a good time to try a boot disk/USB. Haven't got a link but others may suggest... just off for dinner...