Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

Question

Laptop Not Turning On After Hardrive Switch

Apr 13, 2020 4:34AM PDT

I had an older laptop that randomly stopped working, not sure why. I wanted to get some stuff off of the hard drive of it, so I took it out and put it into my newer laptop. With the old hard drive in the new laptop in it would not boot. Thinking maybe it was a hard drive issue, I put the old one back in and now the laptop won't start back up at all. Is it possible this hard drive was corrupted or something and bricked my laptop? Is that something that can happen? I'm not sure why attempting to put this hard drive in would cause this issue. If anyone could shed some light on this I'd appreciate ite

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Answer
Re: hard drive
Apr 13, 2020 5:50AM PDT

You can't use the boot drive of a laptop in another machine. Although it should boot, Windows will fail. So that's a bad way to get data of the disk. The usual way is to put it in an external USB-3 enclosure and connect that to another PC or laptop.

If you write "it won't start up at all", does this mean what it says? Get the disk out and turn it on. It should go through the usual BIOS-messages before complaining it can't find a boot drive. If even that doesn't work, but the usual LED's burn and the usual disks spin, you somehow damaged the motherboard. If that was done by that hard disk or by you, you'll probably never find out.

- Collapse -
reply
Apr 13, 2020 9:19AM PDT

well I put the other hard drive that had windows on it in this computer, and then it let me in the bios. but after a few diagnostic tests it restarted and now it wont turn back on, I switched the old hard drive back in the laptop and its still not turning on, right now its powering on and off by its self but it wont fully boot up.

- Collapse -
Try the usual.
Apr 13, 2020 10:10AM PDT

First remove that HDD since we don't need it to do a power up test.

Now remove power from the laptop in question and then unplug it's battery.
Press and hold the power button for 60 seconds, release then slip in the battery and apply power.
Wait a minute or more to get some charge on the battery then try to power up.

Without a HDD it may complain but that's OK as we just want to see if the basic hardware is good enough to power on and stay on.

Now we can power off, remove the battery to install the HDD. Some techs forget to unplug the battery during work. With the HDD installed, install the battery, apply charger and try again. If Windows doesn't boot or reboots a lot then you want to try booting any other OS from other media. I use Linux for such testing. We do not learn Linux. We only use it to boot up and see if the issue is hardware or a blown OS install.

- Collapse -
reply
Apr 13, 2020 10:49AM PDT

I will try it out and let you know if it works thank you for the information !