Short DST Check failed

[Th3Razzz]

So my laptop has been a bit wonky for a while now, pretty slow in general and this year it gave me a couple crashes to blue screen and reboots.

Forgive me for being vague on the next part, as this happened about a few months ago and I didn't record anything: the best way I can put it is my user account on the PC became corrupted and I could no longer access anything that was stored in that directory (which was everything). When I booted up, I believe I was logged in to a recovery account with a string of numbers/letters as the name. All my data was saved in my recovery drive, and I was able to restore it all by creating a new account and transferring it all over from recovery to the new one.

On Christmas day, I was using the laptop to watch some shows, switched over to a game, stopped playing a moment to help my little brother with something, and when I went back to my game it suddenly blue screened on me, and got stuck at 100% on the error screen, where it should have rebooted. I manually shut it down, rebooted, and was met with the recovery screen.

I tried restoring to a previous point with no success, and then decided to do a full factory reset, which was something I had been meaning to do anyway -- this gave me a "Restoration incomplete" error. The cmd log doesn't state that any errors were encountered, but at the end repeats "CTO Panic because image may not be normal" dialogue a few times.

When I run the diagnostic tests from the BIOS menu, the Hard Drive Short and Long DST Checks fail, but the Optimized DST passes, and the SMART test passes.

The Error ID for the failed DST is

9SP5BF-8T8ABA-XD7URF-61AM03

Every other post I've read indicates the Hard Drive needs to be replaced. This wouldn't be the end of the world if this is the case, but I'm trying to find out if I might have any alternatives to try fixing it myself, like perhaps reformatting it somehow? Or, at the very least, getting a more in-depth explanation as to what is actually going wrong here, beyond knowing the DST has failed. I'm probably going to try reseating the HDD, checking the connections and all that, but I'm looking to find more info before I try anything.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

The easiest thing to do would be to replace the drive.

No one here will be able to give you any explanation as to exactly why the drive has failed.

The most likely cause of the failure is heat. 

Heat is not good for any electrical component and in notebooks, they cannot dissipate the heat fast enough.

The hard drive failure codes are pretty useless to determine what is wrong.  Here is the full report generated by the code you posted, minus your notebook's serial number.  Not much use, as you can see.

Failure Information

Failure ID Tag Checksum HP Serial Number Test Date Failure Code Device Includes Error Message

9SP5BF-8T8ABA-XD7URF-61AM03

OK

XXXXXXXXXX

12/27/20

305

Storage

Floppy Drive, Hard Drive, Memory Drive, Optical Drive, SCSI, Tape Drive

Hard Disk 1 Full Test Failure

Normally, you can't fix a hard drive that is failing or has failed, other than to replace it.

Below is the link to the service manual for your notebook, where you can find the hard drive removal and replacement procedure.

h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c05493257

You may want to consider replacing the mechanical hard drive with a better performing, normally more reliable 2.5" solid state drive (SSD).

After you replace the drive, using another Windows PC with W7 64 bit or newer, you can 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

[Th3Razzz]

Thanks for the reply, and the resources, much appreciated. It's frustrating that there's simply no fix other than replacement, but I guess that's just how it be sometimes with mechanical components. I'll definitely be looking into a SSD, because this is the fastest I've ever had a device outright fail on me, it's only been about 3-4 years that I've had it.

C'est la vie, thanks again

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.