HP Pavilion Gaming 15-ec0013dx SMART Hard Disk check failed.

[JacobRhyne]

Every time I try to boot up, I get a SMART Hard Disk Error 301. Steps I recreated are 1. Going into System Diagnostics and running the Hard Disk Check. 2. After that, it says "The SMART Hard Disk check failed." 3. Another message I got when I went into customer support was "HP Hard drive check has identified a critical failure in your system that requires repair." My computer has 500GB SSD and 32GB of RAM. When I get that SMART Hard Disk Error, it says "The SMART Hard Disk Check has detected an imminent failure. To ensure not data loss, please backup the content immediately and run the Hard Disk Test in System Diagnostics." My computer has Windows 10. How do I fix this after I got the failure?

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

It sounds to me like you will need to install a new NVMe M.2 SSD and reinstall the operating system.

Below is the link to the service manual, where you can find the M.2 drive removal and replacement procedure.

Maintenance and Service Guide HP Pavilion Gaming 15 Laptop PC

After you replace the drive, you should be able to use the HP cloud recovery tool with another Windows PC running W7 64 bit or newer to create a bootable USB recovery drive that will reinstall W10, the drivers and the software that originally came with your notebook.

Here is an info link for how to use that utility...

HP Consumer PCs - Using the HP Cloud Recovery Tool (Windows 10, 7) | HP® Customer Support