- Nov 4, 2013
- 3
- 0
- 18,510
Greetings,
I received a notebook that wouldn't boot - Lenovo U350. It just passed the BIOS self check, then - a blank screen and a blinking cursor.
Removed hard disk - WD Blue and put it on a USB test bench to see what's up:
- It had a single bad sector in the middle of the drive, which should be irrelevant to the issue.
- Successfully copied the person's information to a backup drive.
- Removed all partitions.
- Erased all info + wrote all zero's to the whole drive so we're sure it's empty.
- Performed extended SMART test via Hard Disk Sentinel, checked it with chkdsk - no problems or glitches found at all!
Put it back to the notebook - it's successfully recognized in BIOS Setup, but the same situation appears - right after BIOS self test, it hangs on a blank page with a blinking cursor - no errors, no attempts to boot.
Tried to replace it with a secondary hard drive that I know works - boots successfully, so I think controller fault is not the issue.
Tried with the original hard drive in the laptop, but to attempt to boot from an USB flash, USB harddisk and USB CD - the same blinking cursor situation. The only way I was able to boot from an external device was to disable the hard drive in question from BIOS setup.
Do you have any suggestions on what the issue might be? It's strange that no tool suggested a faulty drive whatsoever.
Thanks,
Alex
I received a notebook that wouldn't boot - Lenovo U350. It just passed the BIOS self check, then - a blank screen and a blinking cursor.
Removed hard disk - WD Blue and put it on a USB test bench to see what's up:
- It had a single bad sector in the middle of the drive, which should be irrelevant to the issue.
- Successfully copied the person's information to a backup drive.
- Removed all partitions.
- Erased all info + wrote all zero's to the whole drive so we're sure it's empty.
- Performed extended SMART test via Hard Disk Sentinel, checked it with chkdsk - no problems or glitches found at all!
Put it back to the notebook - it's successfully recognized in BIOS Setup, but the same situation appears - right after BIOS self test, it hangs on a blank page with a blinking cursor - no errors, no attempts to boot.
Tried to replace it with a secondary hard drive that I know works - boots successfully, so I think controller fault is not the issue.
Tried with the original hard drive in the laptop, but to attempt to boot from an USB flash, USB harddisk and USB CD - the same blinking cursor situation. The only way I was able to boot from an external device was to disable the hard drive in question from BIOS setup.
Do you have any suggestions on what the issue might be? It's strange that no tool suggested a faulty drive whatsoever.
Thanks,
Alex
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