Hard Drive failing to spin up, but when mounted works fine

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tobster911

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Feb 11, 2012
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So, I have a client's Toshiba Laptop in the workshop today. When you power on the laptop, the lights come on, but no bios is displayed, and the HDD access light doesn't even flicker, it's just constantly off.

When I mount the drive into a caddy and plug it in to my laptop, it works fine and there's no problem accessing the data, so at least that can be retrieved.

This points to a power issue rather than an HDD issue. Can anyone shed some light on the situation and assist?

Thank you

T
 
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mrsweet1991
Yes I'd agree it would more than likely go down the root of a more expensive repair either motherboard or CPU, mind you the laptops provided a pretty good life span.
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mrsweet1991

mrsweet1991

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Did you receive any information about what they did before it went like this? the BIOS could be seen even without a hard drive ( as you're probably aware) so you're looking more along the lines of RAM, Processor fault. Maybe try reseating the RAM? also take the battery out and hold the power button for 20 seconds then insert the battery and try turning it on again
 
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tobster911

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I did wonder about that. Seems odd that even the bios isn't displayed initially. I've done the suggested, cleared the capacitors etc, but still no luck. Beginning to get on my nerves a bit...
 
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mrsweet1991

mrsweet1991

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The problem with laptops is it's not easy to just try a different components. Don't suppose you have another stick of RAM you could pop in it for now? so you can take out the old RAM stick(s) and just try one of your own that you know works
 
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tobster911

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I'll see if I can find some.
I've done the removal of ram and tried to turn the laptop on, but there's no beep code or anything. It sounds like the HDD tries to spin a couple of times, then just doesn't. It's certainly an odd one.
 
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mrsweet1991

mrsweet1991

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I'd agree it is strange, but I don't think what the hard drive is doing will help give an indication of what's wrong. If you cannot even get to the BIOS that's related to motherboard, ram, cpu fault so you'll have to keep along those lines.
 
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tobster911

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New ram tried, no avail. I doubt the customer will want to pay for lots more work. I'll phone her shortly and let her know we can save her data, but her laptop (which is a good 5 or 6 years old) has bitten the dust.

Bit of a shame really

Thanks for all your help
 
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