Replacing drive of HP Laptop 14-cf1xxx?

[erimus]

I have an HP Laptop 14-cf1020od, and recently, I've been getting warnings that my Hard Drive may fail:

Failure details - Hard drive check: [...]The test found a problem with your hard drive and it may need to be replaced.

HP Support Assistant lists my drive as SAMSUNG MZNLN128HAHQ-000H1 ,

while the product specs page says my hard drive is 128 GB M.2 Solid State Drive (15)

How can I choose an appropriate (compatible!) replacement drive to buy? Do I need to buy extra parts like a bracket/casing?

Also, how do I go about cloning?copying?installing?reinstalling my Windows 10 and stuff?

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

Here is the Service Manual:

Manual 

Start on p. 31 to open the laptop and inside you see this:

M.2 SSD in red rectangle

You have a 128 gig M.2 SATA SSD. I would recommend you get something larger in capacity and move up to a faster PCie/NVME M.2 SSD. Something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-970-EVO-Plus-MZ-V7S1T0B/dp/B07M7Q21N7/ref=sr_1_3?crid=Y6KU7FNJG51S&dc...

You need no extra parts like a casing or cable. The replacement M.2 SSD will bolt in where the old one is located. 

The opportunity to do a clone or other image of the disk is likely past. Once the drive begins showing errors it is unreliable as the source of a whole-drive image. However, individual files or whole folders can likely be saved off. You can get an external usb adapter for your SATA M.2 and just copy contents from it to the new SSD once the new SSD is installed and Windows running on it. 

https://www.amazon.com/SSK-Aluminum-Enclosure-External-Based/dp/B07MKCG5ZG/ref=sr_1_2_sspa?dchild=1&...

Windows 10 can be reinstalled without a Key Code. Go to the Microsoft Media Creation Tool site and it will give you an option to download and create a usb recovery media for a current version of Windows 10. You make a bootable disk used to replace Windows 10 on your new SSD. 

Drivers can be harvested off the old M.2 as laid out above or downloaded from this site. I am sure this leaves questions and feel free to post back. If this is the info you needed please accept as solution. 

[erimus]

Thanks for your reply!  I've _removed_ a drive from a dead laptop before, but I've never tried to buy a new drive and put it in.

A big thing that was confusing me was abundance of letters and codes in the descriptions on Amazon. I know the SSD is the Solid State Drive that I'm replacing, and higher GB is better, but I'd see a bunch of letters and think, "Well, my old drive doesn't say 'NVMe', so does that mean it's not compatible?"

I was going to ask for more information on understanding the jargon, but careful reading of your reply:

You have a 128 gig M.2 SATA SSD. I would recommend you get something larger in capacity and move up to a faster PCie/NVME M.2 SSD.

...and the descriptions of the products you linked to gave me the context clues that helped me figure it out--so "M.2" is the key to having it be the same size/shape/connection! I'm pretty sure the last two drives I removed were 2.5", so I wasn't familiar with the M.2 form factor at all until now. (I just Googled it)

Thanks--with that, and the rest of your advice, I think I'm good for now.

[erimus]

Follow-up: I successfully installed the new SDD (with a slight detour of unnecessarily removing my battery, because I was looking at the "remove hard drive" part of the manual instead of the SDD part--thank goodness you posted that image with the red box around the SDD.) I reinstalled Windows 10 from a flash drive, and everything is great...

...except my touchpad doesn't work.  

I've downloaded and installed all the updates offered to me by Windows Update and by HP Support, but that hasn't helped. I even tried downloading/installing some other versions of the Elan touchpad driver from the HP site , but Windows just tells me the best driver is already installed.

I've Googled and seen other people with similar problems, but no good solutions. I made a separate post about my touchpad issues elsewhere on these forums, but no responses yet.

I'm kind of wondering if the problem has a physical cause--maybe I accidentally jostled something out of place or got some dust/debris in a bad spot when I was installing the SDD. I may try opening up my laptop again and inspecting/fiddling with the touchpad area.

[Huffer]

The touchpad is connected to the motherboard with the ribbon cable you see down and to the left of the red box in the picture. Highly likely you dislodged that cable when you removed the battery. 

[erimus]

For some reason, I didn't see your reply, and the cable turned out not to be the problem (it ended up being totally a driver thing), but thanks, I appreciate your response.