Liquid damaged laptop, any hope to fix?

[troy_af]

Hi. I recently split a drink over my HP ab254sa, its only 5 month old. I turned it off asap and stripped it and dried out everything the best I could, I left it for a whole week and used a hair dryer multiple times to get it bone dry.


When I've rebuilt it I get the error "boot device not found (3f0)". Searching online it looks to be a very common fault, obviously not after being liquid damaged though. I thought since it will not be covered under warranty I may as well have a go myself, if it's totally screwed or in need of a motherboard then so be it.

What is the best thing to try. One person said to get a windows 10 recovery disk and try to do a restore from that? Do you think I will need a new hdd or is it not reading the hdd for another reason?

thanks.

[WAWood]

troy_af

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

That code generally means your drive has died as the controller is unable to communicate with it properly -- but then -- if the controller leads got shorted out when the laptop got wet, that might product the same result.

About all you can do at this point is remove the drive from the laptop, connect it to a working PC using a UB-to-Hard-Driver adapter, and see if will work with a different PC.

Here are some tips regarding your laptop: You Just Spilled Water Or Coffee On Your Laptop - Here's What You Should Do

Good Luck

[troy_af]

thanks.

I don't have an adapter but I do have another hp laptop, although it is an older version and running windows 7, would it be possible to remove the suspected damaged hdd and try it or vice versa?

[troy_af]

ok I went ahead and swapped the hard drive with the known good hard drive. The same thing still happens on startup and I still do not see the hdd in the list but it does now do a hdd check and tests fine. Does this mean I most likely just need a new hdd or does it probs mean that both the hdd and motherboard are faulty?

[Huffer]

I would put the old HDD in and try to install Windows 10 to it and see if Windows 10 installation sees the drive and then try it again with the known good hard drive. If Windows 10 install will not see either drive I think the motherboard is hosed and needs to be replaced. I would feel more certain about the diagnosis if it were possible to test the old hard drive in another computer. A usb to SATA adapter cost like $11 on amazon.com:

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-SATA-Drive-Adapter-Cable/dp/B00HJZJI84/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=147473...

You can download a Windows 10 install disk image (.iso) from the Microsoft Media Creation tool website and burn a DVD or make a thumb drive to install Windows 10.

Post back with any more questions.  

[troy_af]

right, I tried the suspected faulty hdd in the good laptop and the same error comes up on startup. Also when I try to do a hdd test again it says no hdd found. This confirms a faulty hdd, I just now need to know if the motherboard is faulty also.

I then put the good hdd in the suspected damaged laptop and the same error comes up on startup, but it is able to do a hdd test and it passes. So is there any reason why the good hdd would not startup windows? Is it because it is from an older version laptop? the older laptop is windows 7 with an i3 processor and the newer was windows 10 with an i5 - are they interchangeable?

[troy_af]

I will also try to reinstall windows from a disk I just need to get a blank disc, will an ordinary blank dvd work?

[Huffer]

Yes you need a blank DVD disk and a computer with a DVD burner and internet to download the Media Creation Tool app. 

[troy_af]

Right sorry for the delay. I got a usb stick and downloaded the media creation tool onto it. When I try to install windows onto my hdd it says "windows cant be installed on this drive". The drive it list says drive 0 unallocated space, total size 0.0mb, free space 0.0mb.