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HP Probook 4530s

Windows 10 64-bit

Hello everyone,

I have my windows installed on a Samsung 840 Series SSD 120GB and a WD 320GB HDD as secondary drive in a caddy in the dvd drive space. Both were functioning fine.

I had 301 mb of unallocated space in the HDD and the rest as one partition. I used MiniTool Partition Wizard 9 to extend that one partition with all the unallocated space. After the changes took affect it showed the hdd as one 'bad drive'. I thought i should restart windows to fix this. After restarting the laptop gets stuck on the start screen on which one accesses BIOS, the light of the caps lock blinks 5 times repeatedly and then stops. The hdd sounds like it is on and I cannot access BIOS.

When i remove the hdd windows boots up just fine.

If inserted during windows startup the drive doesn't show up after boot, neither in the file explorer nor in the disk management.

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2 Answers 2

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Sounds to me like the drive is OK, but with a corrupt partition scheme or boot partition/MBR.

If this is combined with your BIOS being set to boot from that secondary drive, there's a possibility of it hanging if it can't find a boot there.

I suggest go through your BIOS to ensure that the secondary drive is excluded from the boot process entirely. Once you have it up and running you can troubleshoot from there.

PS: I recommend installing gparted on a USB stick for working with and troubleshooting partitions. Windows can be a bit troublesome at times for some more uncommon setups.

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  • my laptop's hp bios is strange. in boot options it doesn't show the ssd or the hdd by name. its just 'Notebook Harddrive", "USB Harddrive", "USB CD/DVD Drive", "Floppy", "Ethernet"
    – 78jimm
    Commented Nov 5, 2016 at 13:48
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I think you might fool around with it, and maybe finally get it to work. However, I think it would be best to get all the data off of the 320 GB first, to a USB or elsewhere. File-by-file should be fine to back up a data drive, since I assume you never used that HDD as a boot drive.

Then, simply reformat that drive and restore the files. You might have to put that drive in another PC that is not going to get confused about which drive is the boot drive. Really irritating to hear that your HP BIOS only reports generic, and not specific drives. Nowhere does it even list the manufacturer of the two drives?

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