Hard disk fails on HP Omen Laptop

[guzman23]

Hi!

My notebook started to check the hard drive at boot and I left it doing this process for two days but it got stucked at "Repairing disk errors. This might take over an hour to complete.". Then I power off the system, started it up again and go to hp diagnostic tools (hitting esc and then f2). I ran the quick system test, and only the hard drive test failed (with this failure ID: M4XMXG-8MC985-MFPUQJ-60QM03)

I checked the product warranty and it has ended at 20 June of 2018 so I think that the solution should be to backup my hard drive and buy a new one, what do you think I should do?

And another thing I am not sure is that as the hard drive capacity is 1TB, is it possible to keep the Windows 10 license if I replace it with a new hard drive (may be with less capacity)?

Thank you very much

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

The Windows license will not be lost by replacing the hard drive. If you remove the hard drive and replace it with a new one, the old hard drive will act as its own backup. Just get an inexpensive USB to SATA adapter cable so you can use the old drive as an external drive and copy and paste specific files from it to the new hard drive and Windows installation. Trying to back up the hard drive in its current state might make it harder to get data off it later. You cannot use a drive that is giving error messages as the source drive for a successful clone. 

Microsoft has made reinstalling Windows 10 a piece of cake. Its a free download and you do not even need a Key Code any more. The activation servers will just recognize your computer and know it has a valid Windows 10 license. 

If your reason for getting a smaller drive is cost, there is not much to be saved. A 500 gig is only a couple bucks cheaper than a 1 TB drive. If you can live with a smaller capacity you might want to consider a solid state drive. 

This video will give you some idea what is onvolved:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJyh2zHWFk

Post back with any more questions and please accept as solution if its the info you needed. 

[guzman23]

Thank you Huffer, you solved my doubts about Windows 10 license and the video is helpful.

I finally  decided to buy a new 1TB SSD hard drive to replace the failed one. I tried to fix bad sectos with a third party tool and then I clone the drive into an image.

I will try to restore that image into the new SSD drive as soon as I install it on the laptop. Then I will have the failed hard drive to use it as an external drive as you suggested with an adapter.

Greetings