Replacing hard drive.

[jigbeff]

Hello,

I have a 15-ac108na laptop that has recently decided not to work, the hard drive spins but keeps going into recovery mode, it's in a loop and won't come out and it's only three years old so no noise of death.

Anyway , my question is can i replace the hd that is in there with another sata drive, i have two from other laptops that i have in the house and both run good as i have tried them out on my present laptop with a HD reader, both run windows 10 and run at 5400.

Many thanks

]

[iomare]

Hi,

You could first try performing HP hardware diagnostics on the PC to see if the hard drive produces any errors. Try under heading "perform tests when Windows does not start" in link below:

https://support.hp.com/lt-en/document/c03467259

Yes you can use one of the drive from your other notebooks. You could also opt for an 2.5" SSD. I would reinstall Windows on the drive once you install it. You do not need product key as it is embedded in firmware. You can download the media creation tool from Microsoft, run and create a bootable pendrive with the OS on it. Then use this drive to perform a clean install of Windows 10.

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

On page 42 of service manual you can see the steps to replace drive:

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c04653884

Hope it helps,

David

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[erico · Accepted solution]

Had you considered using the USB recovery flashdrive that you should have created by now to repair the OS?

You can also use a USB Windows 10  installation flash drive to access system recovery and roll the OS back to a recovery point dated before the issue began. 

That should be a lot less hassle than replacing the hard disk.

If you just want to start out with a clean install you can jut install Windows 10 on the hard disk that is installed.

There is no real need to replace it, unless you have run a hard disk test and the result was a hard disk failure code.

It is more likely that the installed operating system that has the issue, not the hard drive.