laptop won't boot-hard disk broke? or worse?

[jerryps80]

Won't start up. Disk light flashes once then nothing, other than fan whirling. 

Does that mean hard disk is broke, or if that was the problem would you expect a message to be displayed such as "no boot drive found"? 

Screen doesn't flicker or anything. Have reseated hard disk (NVMe SSD), but haven't plucked up courage to delve deeper to try to reseat memory chips.

Your thoughts very much welcomed. Thanks in advance.

Jerry

[WAWood]

@jerryps80 

You're mixing terms and that is confusing the issue.  An SSD is not a Hard Disk, it is a Solid State Disk.  

The distinction is more than just wording because while HDDs fail on a regular basis, SSDs, especially the newer NVME SSDs, rarely fail -- and this is also complicated by the inability of the HP diagnostics to faithfully check out the newer NVMe SSDs.

You're right about the error message -- as that would almost certainly be displayed if it was a matter of the boot records having become corrupted.

It's really hard to test m.s NVMe SSDs because they can not easily be connected to another PC to test them.  I have found that what tends to work reasonably well is the following:

1) Find out the manufacturer of the NVMe SSD

2) Go to their website and download any app they have for testing their SSDs

3) Use the information  below to create a bootable USB drive

5) Boot your PC from the USB drive and run the SSD test app

Macrium Reflect is a free tool that can be used to image and restore PCs, but it also has an option to create Rescue Media (in disk or USB form) that can then be used to boot and/or Repair your PC.

It is available from here: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

What I recommend is the following:
a) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR)
b) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD
c) Boot your PC from the MR media -- it will take a while, so be patient!

4) Copy the SSD testing app onto that USB drive

[jerryps80 · Accepted solution]

I bought an SSD enclosure (for £13) which can connect to another laptop using a USB cable. So I removed the SSD hard drive, put it in the enclosure, and I was able to take the data off and back it up. Phew!

So the motherboard or something else must have gone wrong with the original laptop.

[jerryps80]

Thank you WAWood for the pedantry, I honestly do like to be precise as I can. But can I pick you up on your terminology too ... SSD stands for Solid State Drive not "Disk" 😉

Thanks for your help; I went for buying an SSD USB enclosure, a metal version like this one... https://www.orico.shop/en/nvme-m2-ssd-housing.html

[WAWood]

@jerryps80 

Well, I guess we're both now being pedantic -- but you are right about the acronym SSD. <G>

Good luck with using the enclosure -- I presume you are going to use it to do tests on the NVME stick, right?