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    Chronos 7 NP780Z5E Hard Disk Failure?

    Discussion in 'Samsung' started by pagem, Jul 27, 2015.

  1. pagem

    pagem Newbie

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    Hi,

    I bought this laptop a couple of years ago and apart from a glitch with battery it had been a great work horse.

    Until last week when it started to slow down until it was taking many minutes to boot into Windows 8.1. And when booted it was so unresponsive to the point of being unusable. This led me to take a series of steps which may have made problems worse...

    First I tried to Refresh Windows files while leaving my personal files. This threw an error stating key files where missing.

    So I bit the bullet and tried a Reset Windows and said yes to deleting all my files. This also threw an error and at next boot I had an error message stating winload.exe was corrupt or missing. Googled this error and attempted to repair using bootrec /rebuildbcd but this made no difference.

    Next tried to use the inbuilt Samsung Recovery program (F4) at boot up. I only had one image from back in 2012 but selected this and went through the slow (very slow) recovery process. This ended up hanging at "setting user configuration after recovery". After a long wait of several hours I powered off and on. Still not fixed.

    So time for a fresh install of Windows 8, which I saw from this thread can be problematic due to the iSSD HD configuration. Created a Windows 8.1 installation setup on USB and started following the steps. But now in BIOS (step 2) I the HD does not appear in the boot list and all I see is the inserted USB.

    In BIOS it still shows SATA Port 1 - ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB which I think is a reference to the HD. But no HD listed in Boot -> Boot Device Priority or under Exit -> Boot Override.

    Though still slow if I leave the machine I get an very basic text error message:

    All boot options are tried.
    Press <F4> key to recover with factory image using Recovery or any other keys for next boot loop iteration.

    ...and now I cannot get back into F4 to retry recovery

    Does this mean the HD has failed? And if it does can anyone tell me if this is easy to replace?

    Help and advice very much appreciated.
     
    pagem, Jul 27, 2015
    #1