Hi,

So here's a bit of a weird one. The HDD in question, model number in title, came in my NP300E5A Samsung laptop. Today it wouldn't boot and the BIOS would hang if I tried to enter it. Opened it up and felt none of the typical vibration you feel when the HDD spins up so I figured the drive was dead. I removed it and put it into my desktop PC. It did its scan and repair on it and the drive seemed to work perfectly. Put it back in the laptop and the same problem occurs, it won't spin up.

At this point I figure something is wrong with the motherboard or power supply in the laptop so I try another 2.5 inch HDD I have lying around from a Toshiba laptop and it works perfectly. So I have a drive that works in other computers and not the laptop and a laptop that spins up all other drives except for this one.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

can you show us the s.m.a.r.t status of the HDD ?
you can use Hard Disk Sentinel for this purpose...
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

_________________
Data Recovery Pakistan

Sure, below is the SMART status.



Let me know if you need anything else.

Have you measured the +5V supply in your laptop while the drive is trying to power up?

Does your drive spin up if the SATA data cable is not connected?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

I do not have a multimeter at my disposal at the moment. The cable for the laptop is one of those combined sata cables that have both cables in one block.

The Toshiba drive that does work in the laptop requires more current according to its label (1a compared to 0.75a at 5v) so I'd be surprised if voltage is the issue. But maybe the Toshiba motor is fine with slightly less?

How would the voltage issue (if that's the problem) have happened overnight?

The +5V supply is regulated down to +1.2V and +3.3V (for example) for powering the MCU, SDRAM, and flash memory, whereas the full +5V is required to spin up the drive. A power supervisor IC (usually the motor controller) monitors these supply voltages and generates a POR or POK (power-on reset or power OK) when they are within spec. It could be that the level of the +5V supply is high enough for other drives but insufficient for the Samsung. Power supplies typically degrade when their capacitors leak or dry out.

Another possibility may be that the motherboard's SATA controller has begun to degrade. Some (all?) Samsung drives need to establish a SATA link before they will spin up. For example, certain Intel controllers (P67/H67) were affected by a hardware bug, and certain Samsung drives had compatibility issues with AMD (SB850) and Intel chipsets. That said, the UDMA CRC Error Count attribute is clear, so I doubt that this is your problem.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Ok, update on the issue. I purchased a 2.5 inch 7200 RPM WD Black Drive and replace it to see if that was the issue. Testing this drive, the samsung and the toshiba in my desktop, only the toshiba would spinup with only power connected. Both the samsung and WD drives needed to wait for SATA initialization. So I figured if that was the problem then my WD would also fail to spin up in the laptop.

But the WD drive seemed to work fine. Thought it was all good so I installed windows, did a couple in place upgrades to the newest build (as this was the win 10 tech preview) and started installing drivers. A couple reboots in and the computer got to windows, but stayed at a black screen with no HDD activity. Figuring it was a bug with Win10, I rebooted and at this point the WD now fails to spinup in the laptop, working fine in the desktop.

Does this point to the SATA controller in the laptop? And if so, why would the drive work for a while and then stop? Also, although I'm not sure if it is relevant, the new WD got quite hot while it was in operation in the laptop, hotter then I would comfortably be with a laptop drive. Didn't measure temp, but being uncomfortable to the touch is normally not a typical thing for hard drives. I shrugged it off as it being a side effect of the faster 7200RPM motor along with the large amount of activity that comes with a new OS installation.

Any explanation or theories on this would be highly appreciated.

Thanks.