booting with bad HD

mike

2013-12-12 04:03:45 UTC

Post by ps56k
A friend has an old HP TC4400 laptop.
It was sold off from the local school district,
and was running fine for awhile.
It will not boot,

what's the definition of "will not boot?"
Exactly what happens, BIOS? POST? can't read disk? Can't
find OS? Aborts in the middle?
The devil is in the details.

OS??? windows? which? linux? which? OSX ???

Post by ps56k
and in removing the SATA drive - it does not init

Init?
Laptop USB?

on another laptop USB,

Post by ps56k
but other SATA drives work fine in the same USB carrier.
So - it appears to be bad/dead.

Probably, but can't really tell anything from what you've said.

Post by ps56k
Now - the TC4400 has no CD/DVD to try various testing.
Most all of my other laptops and drives are still IDE,
but I do have one that is SATA.
Even if I copy or clone a drive image onto a new SATA drive,
install it into the failing laptop,
is there going to be a problem trying to boot from the IDE clone image
onto the SATA expecting hardware ??

Probably

Post by ps56k
ie - does the Boot manger and other related files/drivers
expect the environment to be SATA,
when all the files say it is IDE ?

That's been my experience with windows.
Probably not the reason you said, but the symptom end point is
no boot.

Post by ps56k
ELSE -
I'll have to figure out to create a total backup clone image
from my Dell E6400 SATA laptop to an external USB SATA drive...
and then try and use that -
OR - will I still have probs/conflicts with other "drivers" - screen, etc -

If you're determined to torture yourself, do some googling. Put a small
os like Puppy Linux onto a thumb drive and boot that to see if everything
else works.
Got a USB CD drive? Try booting the windows install disk or live linux
disk from that.