Windows wont boot with Bad secondary hdd

[78jimm]

HP Probook 4530s

Windows 10 64-bit

Hello everyone,

I have my windows installed on a Samsung 840 Series SSD 120GB and a WD 320GB HDD as secondary drive in a caddy in the dvd drive space. Both were functioning fine.

I had 301 mb of unallocated space in the HDD and the rest as one partition.  I used MiniTool Partition Wizard 9 to extend that one partition with all the unallocated space. After the changes took affect it showed the hdd as one 'bad drive'. I thought i should restart windows to fix this. After restarting the laptop gets stuck on the start screen on  which one accesses BIOS, the light of the caps lock blinks 5 times repeatedly and then stops. The hdd sounds like it is on and I cannot access BIOS.

When i remove the hdd windows boots up just fine.

[WAWood]

78jimm

So, is your PC configured so that you can connect the drive in the caddy AFTER Windows is running?

If so, I would boot that way, and after connecting the drive, see what Disk Management has to say about that drive.

IF it shows the drive as RAW, that is a really bad sign, as that means that Windows can no longer read the Partition Boot Record.  You would then need to recover the data present in that drive to another using data recovery applications, reformat the drive, and restore the data.

Good Luck

[78jimm]

I tried just that: inserted the caddy after windows booted and the drive didn't show up in the file explorer or disk manager.

[WAWood]

I've had problems seeing corrupted drives using drive adapters and have had to resort to connect the hard drive directly to the motherboard of my desktop in order to run diagnostics on it.

I don't know how your disk caddy works, but in general, if Disk Management doesn't see the drive, that means it is DEAD.

If Disk Management sees the drive and does not show a drive letter, that can mean unsafe removal or filesystem corruption --both of which can be fixed.

You could try running diagnostics from booting the laptop (I believe this is using F2) -- but it's likely that the HP diagnostics will not see the drive, either.

Your only recourse at this point is to try to connect the drive using a different USB-to-Hard_Drive adapter to the laptop or to a desktop to see if that shows the drive.

Good Luck

[78jimm · Accepted solution]

i solved it myself.

set to fast boot.

then gave drive a letter.