Hard disk failure

[ubuysa]

I'm not really looking for help here, more to check that I didn't miss anything....

Some dear friends have been visiting Crete for the last 3 weeks, they have an olive grove here. They went home this morning. Last night (at 9:30pm) I got a frantic phone call that their laptop had died. When I went to see it (yes, I do house calls!) all it would do was display the "no bootable device found" message. A trip into the BIOS and it showed no hard disk present at all. I attempted to run the hard disk test in the BIOS and it failed with no hard disk found. I told them their hard disk had failed and there was nothing I could do. I do have spare HDDs but I wasn't going to muck about swapping disks and reinstalling Windows etc. at that time of night when they were leaving at 8am the next morning. On top of that their HP Pavilion didn't have a cover over the HDD it would have meant taking the whole back cover off.

I should mention that this laptop has been aboard a yacht for it's whole life (bought in 2009) and in the last two years it's sailed from here across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to Australia. Frankly I'm surprised it's still working at all!

The reason for this post is to see if the smart minds on here can think of anything I missed. I could boot the Windows install DVD but when I ran diskpart it saw no hard disk on the laptop and Startup Recovery found no OS to recover. I ran the memory test just because it was there but it ran clean. So just for my own education, what else could I have done? I was under a bit of time pressure last night but I can't think of anything else I could have checked.

 

[Mordant]

Short of taking the back off I can't think of anything else you could've tried.

 

[dogbot]

The laptop is feeling old. It has travelled the world and suffered many ups and downs during storms. Its battery is now pumping at only 20% capacity and it is tired of life. It chose it's moment of dying wisely when little could be done. Maybe you missed the small label next to the Windows serial number where 'In emergency call PCS.co.uk' had been scratched out and replaced by 'Do not resuscitate'.

If the shock treatment of 20,000 volts failed to restore any life then I guess there was nothing else you could do. All that is left is to operate and remove the drive and store in a jar of formaldahyde until it is possible to try transplanting the data cells to another computer.

A post mortem might reveal the cause of death, perhaps corrosion of the contacts, but my feeling would be to give the laptop a dignified burial.

 

[ubuysa]

The laptop is feeling old. It has travelled the world and suffered many ups and downs during storms. Its battery is now pumping at only 20% capacity and it is tired of life. It chose it's moment of dying wisely when little could be done. Maybe you missed the small label next to the Windows serial number where 'In emergency call PCS.co.uk' had been scratched out and replaced by 'Do not resuscitate'.

If the shock treatment of 20,000 volts failed to restore any life then I guess there was nothing else you could do. All that is left is to operate and remove the drive and store in a jar of formaldahyde until it is possible to try transplanting the data cells to another computer.

A post mortem might reveal the cause of death, perhaps corrosion of the contacts, but my feeling would be to give the laptop a dignified burial.

You make some excellent points, I will forever punish myself for not seeing the "In case of emergency" sticker and missing the DNR. A post mortem is now not possible since the laptop has left the country. I suppose it will go down as accidental death?