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July 12th, 2020 19:00
Latitude E6440 can't see HDD
If onboard diagnostics check gives green light to everything except the hard drive is there any point to going into the BIOS and changing any of the settings? It is the same drive I just took out an hour ago and I know the drive is fine and I have tried reseating. (I have also tried another working HDD out of desperation — no go also) If i try to do a win10 install from USB it can see disk but I don't want to start from scratch. Please help
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jphughan
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July 12th, 2020 19:00
@Dosfordummies If Windows Setup can see the disk, then the system has to be seeing it at a firmware level. A diagnostics warning doesn't mean the system can't see it; it might be getting flagged for a high error rate or a SMART warning, for example. If you're saying that your system can't BOOT from that disk anymore but you want to recover some data from it, I would suggest either connecting that disk to another system (possibly via a SATA to USB adapter for convenience) or booting your current system into an environment that will allow you to capture data, such as Macrium Reflect Rescue Media, which you can create from any PC using Macrium Reflect Free. But even if you can get the data you want, I definitely wouldn't bother starting from scratch on a disk that's failing diagnostics.
Dosfordummies
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July 12th, 2020 20:00
Thanks, all good advice. Message I get at startup is "No bootable devices" strike F1 to retry .....etc. Retrieving data not a big issue it was more that I would have to install all the programs again and activate Windows. The laptop is a refurb and I don't have info on activation key. Confident there are no bad sectors as I checked with seagate Sea Tools
jphughan
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July 12th, 2020 21:00
@Dosfordummies I would be surprised if removing the coin cell battery suddenly made your drive bootable. Your system is already detecting it at a firmware level if Windows Setup can see it, so if it's not bootable then it's probably because some boot-critical data on the disk is damaged. If you suspect a BIOS issue, you can try pressing F12 during startup to access the one-time boot menu and explicitly choose the drive as your boot device, but if that causes the same behavior, then it's not a BIOS issue.
As for retrieving the Windows product key, I believe there are ways that can be extracted even from an "offline" Windows partition, i.e. a disk that contains a Windows partition other than the one being used to run the current Windows environment, although I haven't had a need to do that. But if you find a tool that can do that, you could capture an image file of your disk in its current state (again using something like Macrium Reflect Free), then mount the image file as a virtual disk somewhere else and run that tool to attempt to extract the product key. But even that idea assumes that your disk is in sufficiently good shape to be captured in an image backup.
Dosfordummies
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July 12th, 2020 21:00
@jphughan Given my earlier reply, would doing the following be worth a try?
Disconnect the AC.
Remove Main Battery.
Remove Base cover.
Disconnect BIOS/Coin Cell battery for 1-2 minutes.
Connect the BIOS battery.
Replace Base Cover.
Do not replace the Main Battery.
Turn over and open.
Now connect the AC.
The system should try to boot 3 times automatically