HDD not booting to windows but is readable via enclosure

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iam480p

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Oct 18, 2017
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Hi. Please help. My 500gb hgst hard drive ran into a SMART status bad error then when I booted it, my laptop directly opened the BIOS.

After looking into the bios, I found out that the hard drive was not detected by the BIOS. So I pulled the HDD out ( painful task I know) and putted it in an enclosure. To my surprise, every files of mine are there including the partitions. Games, programs are all still there and operational. What could be the problem? Thanks for your reply.

Laptop: ASUS X540LA


Quick Edit: I don't think the issue is in the motherboard since a replacement hard drive works perfectly fine. Am running on an 80gb hdd from my mate's old IBM laptop. Compare that to 500gb of storage lol. Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thank you
 
Solution
The Paladin
the problem is probably your bootstrap sector on your HDD, preventing it to boot properly but still permits you to access it anyways (files tables are not affected) why you can access it via a enclosure, I would back up your files, and toss it out, it will fail further in near future., time to get new drive.
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Rookie_MIB

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Jul 27, 2013
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What was the SMART error reported? You can download and install any number of free SMART status tools to see what it was.

If it was REALLOCATED SECTORS, PENDING SECTOR, or UNCORRECTABLE SECTOR you may have media errors which (as mentioned) could have affected the boot section of the drive. This means that the drive is most likely failing and should be replaced. If it was an ECC based error and you have no PENDING SECTOR, BAD SECTOR, or UNCORRECTABLE SECTOR, then you could just have some minor 'bit rot'* on the boot sector which is fixed by rewriting the boot sector. If you can get a boot USB (or the install media) you can run the 'bootrec /fixmbr' command and that might help.

Here's a detailed guide because some of it does depend on your OS.

https://neosmart.net/wiki/fix-mbr/

Best of luck, and BACK UP YOUR FILES before doing any of this.

Oh, and for gods sake, replace that spinny disk with a SSD if you can. MUCH more reliable.
 
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iam480p

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Oct 18, 2017
43
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10,535
I'm not actually sure but what I saw was, S.M.A.R.T status bad. Backup and replace. Press F1 to resume..

Thanks for the suggestion Rookie_MIB. I will try the commands. Will update back the results tomorrow (probably)
 
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