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Latitude e6430 broken hdd
Hi everybody. I recently dropped my e6430 and it wont boot up. This was confirmed by a full diagnostic but that has now stopped working too.
I have a request. Do you have an original hdd left over from an upgrade that you would be willing to donate?
What I am planning is to upgrade to ssd myself and use the laptop as a music player only that would perform no other function (I have a later model that I am writing on now).
I am pretty sure all e6000 series drives are compatible.
As long as it has an OS of some kind and I can prove the rest of the unit works ok, any other spec is not important.
If you have such but would like it back I am happy to return it after testing. I only need to prove boot up into the desktop.
I am based in the West Country in UK
Thanks
filbert
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February 3rd, 2023 10:00
How do you mean that it did work after the drop but now has stopped working? Any status lights? Any BIOS screen?
Check if the light is lit at the plug end of the AC adaptor. And see if that light remains lit when you plug it into the laptop's jack. It's possible that the charging jack or motherboard were damaged in the fall.
There is nothing special about the drives in those laptops. You may use any standard 2.5" SATA drive. And in that model it's easy to access the drive, as it slides out of the laptop after removing some screws.
You could create a bootable flash drive with Ubuntu Live on USB flash drive. You can do that from your working PC, then boot it on the dropped laptop. If the system will let you access BIOS, then you can boot from the Ubuntu flash drive to test out various hardware components and functions.
But, if you cannot even power on the laptop and access BIOS, then no flash drive or hard drive will help you. In such a case, as long as AC adapter appears to work (as I mentioned earlier), you could disassemble the laptop to check that all components are still well seated and cables are firmly connected. If it were me, I would remove and reseat all components such as drive, RAM and wireless card even if they look solid.
Whenever touching components or working inside a computer, wear a grounded wrist strap, also called anti-static wrist strap, ESD wrist strap, or ground bracelet. It's a cheap and sensible precaution. Rest the laptop on an anti-static mat or at least a reasonable alternative such as corrugated cardboard.
If the laptop is toast, you can connect the hard drive to an external USB drive interface or insert in a USB enclosure to mount and access its contents from your working PC. That way you could save/copy your files. Now, if the drive itself was damaged that might not be possible, such as if the laptop dropped while the drive heads were accessing the platters to read or write.
filbert
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1.8K Posts
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February 3rd, 2023 14:00
Correct. That's why I told you that you don't need to look for special drives for e6000 series, as your system uses a standard 2.5" SATA drive.
If the system cannot past POST (power on self test) and let you access BIOS, then you have a hardware issue other than the hard drive. Even without a hard drive at all, a laptop can let you access BIOS (via F2 while booting). The Owner's Manual has a section entitled Device Status Lights that will tell you what hardware issues the various combinations of status lights signify.
And, as the next section Battery Status Lights says, a blinking battery LED does not indicate charging. Charging is signified by a solid white light. Blinking light can indicate failed battery and/or unsupported or unauthenticated AC adapter, depending upon colour and pattern of blinking.
Foxbass
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February 3rd, 2023 14:00
Update. Firstly, thanks for the replies.
The laptop fell while off and did not sustain any physical damage.
I have opened it and checked a few things but I am not a tech. Everything seems fine.
Initially, the unit would not complete the boot cycle but I managed to get it to do a blue screen full diagnostic. It showed that the hdd is the problem. Everything else had a clean sheet. The charger is good and the input socket is fine. Oddly, after doing a full system check and asking it to fix problems and re-set, (no luck) I left the unit on charge for a couple of hours as it had sat unused for months. Just this evening I tried to fire it up but now the fan spins up for a few seconds, the hdd light, battery light and bluetooth light all flash for a second then it shuts down with no life from the screen. Strangely the hdd light remains lit while the charge light slowly flashes showing it is on charge.
An IT friend suggests that as the diag showed no other faults I should be able to replace the hdd and load a new OS.