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A month or so ago, my sister dropped her laptop (an HP Pavilion DV7 running Windows 7), and after that the machine would no longer boot -- at power-on it would just display a message: "a disk read error has occurred -- press ctrl-alt-delete to restart", and make a high-pitched beeping sound.

My sister put the unusable laptop aside, and then last week gave it to me to look at. When I looked at it, the battery had depleted to zero, but after plugging the laptop into AC power, it booted normally and appears to be working fine. In particular, I had windows scan the filesystem for errors (it didn't find any errors), and I ran the utility program CrystalDiskInfo to see if there were any SMART errors reported by the drive (it didn't report any). I also opened up the laptop to make sure the drive's connection to the motherboard was secure; as far as I could tell, it was. I haven't heard any funny noises emanating from the laptop.

My question is, should I trust this drive to continue working properly, or should I replace it? It seems to be working fine, but I can't think of a mechanism for how the laptop would stop working after a fall, and then spontaneously start working again; it makes me wonder what exactly is going on internally.

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    From a command prompt, enter chkdsk /r. It will say it can't run and allow you to schedule the check for the next bootup. The process could take several hours on a large drive and should not be interrupted once it starts. This will check for both filesystem corruption and damage to the platters (which will be locked out if found). The results will give you more information on the state of the drive. Repeat the test a few days later to see if any new errors show up (particularly bad sectors). Report back the initial results and people will be better able to assess what's going on.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Mar 8, 2015 at 3:57
  • Never trust a hard drive dropped or not. You should always have at least two current backups in addition to your primary copy. One should be off site. If you have a good backup system, then the hard drive might not matter all that much.
    – Zoredache
    Commented Mar 8, 2015 at 9:28
  • Thanks for the suggestion @fixer1234. I tried it, and the results (as viewed in eventvwr the next morning) indicated that chkdisk did not find any problems with the drive or filesystem.
    – Jeremy Friesner
    Commented Mar 9, 2015 at 15:08
  • If chkdsk and SMART both show no problems, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Make regular backups "just in case".
    – fixer1234
    Commented Mar 9, 2015 at 19:39

1 Answer 1

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You wouldn't trust someone who told you, "Hey, I put a dent in your car," and then later told you, "Oh, never mind, your car is fine."

We should identify what lied, since the laptop couldn't boot, and then it could.

Before doing so, I must emphasize: It it good practice to make backups anyway.

There are two suspects:

  1. The drive
  2. The components relating to the drive (SATA connection, motherboard)

1. The drive

There could be drive damage that hasn't manifested itself in S.M.A.R.T. because the damaged areas haven't been discovered by the drive yet. You wouldn't know unless the damaged sectors were being read from or written to.

2. The components relating to the drive

It is also possible that the drive is completely fine, but perhaps a connection to the drive has been flaky. If this is happening, I would just open the laptop to make sure the cables to the drive are secure.

Probable Cause

Your sister's laptop indicated that there was a "disk read error", which would have triggered a S.M.A.R.T. attribute to increment if the disk itself reported the issue, but you discovered that there were no S.M.A.R.T. errors. This might mean that the laptop was unable to connect to the drive entirely, which could have triggered the "disk read error".

Conclusion

The drive is likely fine, but always make sure you or your sister has a backup and recovery plan as a precaution.

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  • I've seen the problem described in the last paragraph. As you said, @Deltik, the HD never logs a S.M.A.R.T. error because it never got the read command in the first place. The drive might well be fine (laptop HDs are amazingly robust); the problem could be an intermittent on the laptop's motherboard. But you can't prove it from a few boots.
    – Jamie Hanrahan
    Commented Mar 8, 2015 at 3:52
  • As little as i know about laptop hard drives, they are supposed to have a built in shock/drop detection system, that parks the head, and stops the drive. If the drive had been disabled from a shock, via a logic curcuit, it could be that a full power cycle (battery depleted) reset the shock system. Whatever, still the best advice is all here, a proper backup of everything covers it all.
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Mar 8, 2015 at 4:19

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