HDD Defective. Audio Missing. Performance Much Slower. Certain Start Options Missing.

[mattorbita]

There's a lot that's happened here, because I spent a lot of time trying to solve this issue myself, so I'll go in chronological order.

About a week ago, my computer would just...get stuck at the Omen loading screen. I would force shut down by holding the power button, and then start it back up, and the same thing would happen. Sometimes, instead of just the loading screen, it would say: "Preparing Automatic Repair". But it would just get stuck on that screen for hours on end. It stayed on that automatic repair screen for 8 hours straight before I just gave up and forced shut it down.

I ran into this potential solution online about doing a hard reset, which involves disconnecting the power cord of the CPU entirely, holding down the power button for 10 seconds, and then reconnecting the power cord and trying to start up the computer again. A new black screen came up, that said something alone the lines of, "hard disk failure imminent".

I went back online and learned how to do a component test. And so I did that. And sure enough, the test result was: "Hard drive/SSD short DST check failed".

I looked into trying to repair/replace my current hard drive via warranty, but I got too impatient and just went and bought a new one entirely. The old, seemingly-defective hard drive was 1TB in size, and this new one is 2TB. But we'll get into that in just a second.

I remember turning to the HP virtual assistant, and it suggested doing a CMOS reset. I couldn't quite figure out how to perform that reset, and so I was pointed to a BIOS recovery, which I did. Did not solve the problem--not like I expected it too exactly.

But then...I learned online that I could remove the hard drive myself pretty easily from the CPU. And I have an SSD, which is where the OS is loaded. Therefore, according to the research I had done, the computer should run as normal...hard drive-less. So I took it out of the CPU, and then tried to run my computer.

...It worked!

However, there was now suddenly missing functionality: couldn't detect my monitor as an audio source (even though I did not tamper with those cables at all), some missing start options, like the Sleep option, and much worse performance. I tried running my games, and boy, did they run slow. Perhaps these things aren't a cause of the defective hard drive: perhaps they are all separate problems that happened simultaneously. But I'm not sure.

Anyway, I get this new 2TB hard drive. I first try backing up the old, 1TB drive. I ordered this USB hard drive adapter from Amazon, which even came with this power adapter to aid in the connection of a 3.5" hard drive--my 1TB drive. I try loading it in as an external drive onto my laptop, the very laptop I'm using right now to type this very dire message.

The drive shows up on my laptop as an E drive, and when I try opening it...it just won't load. I left it loading for 30 minutes straight. Perhaps a 1TB drive just takes absurdly long to load? But, and maybe I misread my sources here, I hear that external drives should not be taking that long to load.

At this point, I got impatient, and I really just wanted to get to use my PC as normal again, and so I skipped trying to back up the defective drive. This hurt my heart, because I got some pretty important files in there. I went ahead with the drive replacement, I followed this online tutorial about allocating the new drive space through Disk Management, and...voala! I now have 2 new terabytes of storage space!

I check the things that were missing before, and...they're still missing. Audio source is still not being detected. The same start options that were missing before...are still missing. And my games still run like it's the 1960s.

In simpler terms, my PC with its new 2TB hard drive runs the same as when it was entirely hard drive-less.

I would appreciate some extra help on if there's still hope in grabbing some of those files from the defective hard drive, but my priority right now is on figuring out how to make the desktop work with the new hard drive. Thanks, guys. And sorry for dumping a whole bible on you.

[sandytechy20]

@mattorbita

Welcome to the HP support community.

I understand that your HDD is defective, I am glad to assist you.

This seems to be a hardware issue and requires one on one interaction to fix the issue.

I am sending you a private message with the steps to talk to HP support.

Please check the mailbox icon at the top-right corner of this screen.

I hope this helps resolve this issue completely,

If this helps, please mark the public post as an accepted solution so that it benefits several others.

Cheers.