Hard drive only works when outside of laptop

[Ethanbrasoveanu]

Hello all,

I have an HP Pavilion 15z Touch, which I bought back in December 2018, and it has the original 1TB 5400 rpm SATA hard drive it originally came with, and everything was working fine until tonight, where I turned it on, and all I saw at the boot screen after the HP logo was black, no fail to boot, just black, and the hard drive was making very loud clicking noise. I thought that the hard drive was dead, and I needed to replace it. But before you tell me that I need to replace the drive and that it is completely dead, whenever I would plug the drive into my HP Envy All in one a050 desktop using an external sata caddy, it would work perfectly fine, I can read, and write to the drive, and it sounds just like it should, no clicking. But whenever I put it into the Pavilion 15z Touch, it makes a loud clicking noise and doesn't boot. Any fixes?

I am a software developer, and have to resort to only using my desktop as of right now, and my laptop is really useful to me so that I can do things on it when I am on the go, so any working suggestions are appreciated

[WAWood]

@Ethanbrasoveanu 

OK, but when you are using the drive in the other PC, you are not trying to boot from it, right?

So, it could be that the OS partition is just fine but the boot files have become corrupted.

If your PC can not boot into Windows, a way around that is to follow the instructions below to create boot media from Macrium Reflect (MR) that can be used to rewrite/repair the boot media on your PC:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from this link on a working PC: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
2) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

That will create MR bootable media. Then, you can boot your PC into WinPE using that media.

Have patience, as that can take a while to start and bring up the screen.

Once the screen is there, select the option to Fix Windows boot problems. It will then search for the OSs installed and list them, Select the one you want to repair and click Next.

It will now do the repairs, listing the things it has done.

When finished, select the option to Restart the PC.

If this worked, the boot repair succeeded and you will have your PC back.

[Ethanbrasoveanu]

Yes, I did not boot from the drive on the desktop, only just read and write to it, but I highly doubt that the boot partition is corrupted, since the laptop would probably quickly display "No operating system found" or something like that instead of showing a black screen, and shutting off a few seconds later. Plus I don't think hard drives make clicking noises when data on it is corrupted, only when they are completely dead, but I will try your suggestion, and see if it works

[Ethanbrasoveanu]

@WAWood The suggestion you gave me did not work, as when I select the button to fix boot issues, the computer freezes and the hard drive starts making the erratic clicking noises endlessly. I waited for about 7 minutes now, and it is still frozen, with the hard drive making the very loud clicking noise

[Lil_Boy_Blue]

Hi

Can I play?

I agree with WAWood about the boot area.

Why?  If it's an SSD am I going to have egg on my face.

Well 2 things come to mind, old timers remember the PARK command for early drives no doubt.  Currently that is automatic and the heads are parked out of harms way.

If the mechanism is worn then the ability to park and position accurately is lost, even to the point with early floppies of the oversizing to get more than 80 tracks the nut comes off the end of the thread, or it hits the buffers, or causes damage/corruption to the Platters. 

I think the clicking is the mechanical positioning arm at the end of it's travel and/or life.

[Ethanbrasoveanu]

Ok, I agree with @Lil_boy_blue that the hard drive might be nearing the end, which I really hope it isn't the case, but even though @WAWood suggestion didn't work for me, I can definitely agree that it is something to do with the boot part on the drive, because even when the drive is plugged into my desktop, yes I can read and write to it, but when I try to boot to it, no matter what device I try to boot to it from, it starts making the clicking noises and not booting. So I will try backing up the data on the drive, formatting it, and reinstalling Windows and I will post if that works or not

[Ethanbrasoveanu · Accepted solution]

Ok, I have reinstalled Windows 10, and now the laptop works perfectly.