www.hp.com/go/techcenter/PCDiags missing in action

[HughR]

This computer is sick.  The "HP PC Hardware Diagnostics UEFI" HDD test fails.

It says to look up the failure at www.hp.com/go/techcenter/PCDiags

That URL no longer works.  Is there a replacement?

The failure ID is "94p5u0-87xaq8-xd7x6j-60t303".  Googling for that gets no hits.

[iomare]

Hi,

The failure id indicates that the Hard Drive has failed the quick test and needs to be replaced.

You could replace with a cheap SSD which might give a little boost to the performance of the machine

Example

https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-240GB-Solid-SA400S37-240G/dp/B01N5IB20Q/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords...

on page 40 of service manual you can see the steps to replace the drive

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c04653881.pdf

You can create a bootable USB drive on another PC with the OS on it and then use this drive to reinstall Windows 10 on the machine

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

Hope it helps,

David

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[HughR · Accepted solution]

I never got an answer to my question.  This does not reflect well on HP.  So I proceeded without benefit of HP diagnostics.

I booted Fedora Linux from a USB flash memory stick -- Windows was broken and could not repair itself.  Linux's Gnome Disk Utility let me do various maintenance tasks, including S.M.A.R.T. analysis.

The disk had a small number of blocks that were pending relocation (8, if I remember correctly).  All that was needed was a write to each of those blocks -- the disk controller then mapped those drives to a new working block.  I did this by brute force: dd'ing /dev/zero to the whole raw disk.  I could have used something more elegant but I've been using dd for over 40 years.

I installed Win 10 (downloaded from Microsoft) and Ubuntu Linux 20.06 LTS.  All seems healthy.

So far, the old disk is working fine.

As expected the disk is slower that an SSD is slow.

New mystery: The Win 10 is unacceptably slow.  According to the owner, much slower than the system used to be.  Ubuntu is fast but not familiar to the owner.  See https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/hp-15-af110ca-very-slow-after-...

[HughR]

As you can see from my other reply, the disk didn't need replacing.  We'll see how durable it is.

You could not know that from the information I posted.  This shows how the HP diagnostics are not very good.

If it were my machine, I would have replaced the HDD with an SDD, just for the speed increase.