Hard Disk Short DST : FAILED. Now What?

[Swanson8r]

Hello,

  I am troubleshooting a relative’s laptop failure to boot into Windows 10.

hp Pavilion dv7-7030us

Serial: [edit] (well out of the 1 year warranty)

The Symptom is a neverending circle of blue dots spinning under the Windows 10 logo at startup.  I have tried pulling the battery for a hard reset, but no luck.  I was able to hit Esc and run a diagnostic test, which resulted in Hard Disk Short DST : FAILED.

FAILURE ID : 9GC0H1-6749LJ-QFPK1G-60WX03

PRODUCT ID : B4T68UA#ABA

Hard Disk 1

All other tests, including the SMART Disk test, passed.

From a quick search of the forums, it looks like this failure indicates a hardware problem or imminent failure of the drive, and I should connect it to another computer to perform a disk clone or file copy of anything important. The DST Failure Message led me to the hp support site which told me to contact support, so I am posting here in case there are any additional tools or diagnostics I can use to get more details on the specific problem. 

Thanks!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

The exact translation of the code is:  Hard Disk 1 Quick Test Failure.

That means the hard drive needs to be replaced and the operating system reinstalled.

Below is the link to the service manual for your notebook.  The HDD R & R procedure can be found in chapter 4.

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c03221579

You may want to consider replacing the hard drive with a better performing, normally more reliable solid state drive.

The chances of recovering any data are not very good. 

However, after you replace the hard drive, you can see if you can read any data from it by purchasing a sata to usb hard drive adapter such as this...

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-SATA-Drive-Adapter-Cable/dp/B00HJZJI84/ref=sr_1_2_sspa?hvadid=77...

After you replace the hard drive, you can reinstall W10 for free as follows...

You can make a W10 USB flash drive installer with the Microsoft Media Creation Tool, using an 8 GB flash drive using another Windows PC, if your PC is not working.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

If you are asked to enter a product key during the installation process, select the 'I don't have a product key' option, and W10 will install and automatically activate once you are connected to the internet.

Here are the steps to create the W10 USB flash drive installer...

Select Download tool now, and select Run.If you agree to the license terms, select Accept.

On the What do you want to do? page, select Create installation media for another PC, and then select Next.

Select the language, edition, and architecture (64-bit or 32-bit) for Windows 10. You want 64 bit. 

Select which media you want to use:  USB flash drive. Plug in a blank USB flash drive with at least 8GB of space. Any content on the flash drive will be deleted.

After W10 installs, you can install the drivers and available software from your PC's support page.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-pavilion-dv7-7000-entertainment-notebook-pc-seri...

[Swanson8r]

Thanks for the suggestions Paul. I was able to remove the hard drive with little difficulty, and connect it inside a spare desktop PC that had a spare hard drive of equal or greater capacity that I didn't mind wiping and replacing with the failing drive's contents. Doing this instead of a USB to SATA adapter also gave me a higher data rate so the cloning could finish sooner. I popped in an older copy of UBCD I had burned (https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/)  so I could run clonezilla in expert mode to continue cloning even if errors were encountered. There were plenty of read errors at the begining and end of the drive, but in the end the clone succeeded after an overnight run (the drive was 1TB). 

Once that was done, I felt safe to use a sub to sata adapter on my laptop to browse for files on both the original and cloned drive, and was able to access most of the files I was interested in preserving.

I have ordered a replacement laptop, and will also continue forward with attempting to reinstall the OS on the current laptop. One concern: The OS license sticker is for Windows 7 Home Premium. Will there be any issues applying that license to the downloaded Windows 10 64 bit, which had been upgraded to? Alternatively, is it possible to get a copy of Windows 7 to install?

On a slight tangent, I noticed the laptop also has a spot for a second hard drive, but no bracket or sata cable. Is there a way to add those parts so I can bypass having to copy over the cloned data and just add the cloned drive as a slave / secondary data drive?

Thanks again.