Question I Have a Cursed 2.5inch hard drive.

[johnnified]

Sorry if this is a long explanation but it is needed.

With most of my computers I do a yearly reformat of the PC and reinstall Windows from scratch. Just a way of keeping it clean.

Five years ago I had a laptop. Things were running strange on it and I didn't know why, so I decided to do my reinstallation of it (only did it once before on the laptop). This time during the windows install screen I chose to "Delete" the partition and click "New" so it reconfigured it. I've done this as well dozens of times. Nothing ever went wrong until this time. As I clicked "New" and it was in the process of allocating it my Laptop powered off thanks to my blindness of not seeing it unplugged from the power supply (battery died). So I powered it back on and now the harddrive isn't being detected in the windows installation. The BIOS menu shows it is plugged in, but it wont show.

This is where the "Cursed" part comes in:

I figured since I have 8 other computers (1 other laptop and 7 custom built PC's) that I would just plug it into one of those and see if it works. Turns out when I install the HDD (plugging it in with PC turned off of course) that the Computer wont boot to ANY drives. Even using the boot menus and manually selecting the main C: drive that windows is installed on for that PC it says "Failed to boot to windows. Please repair" Even trying to boot into the DVD OR USB windows install doesnt work it keeps saying that the files arent there and missing drivers to even do the windows install. However the moment I unplug the HDD from my PC everything boots up perfectly and flawlessly like it did before.

This hard drive is cursed and I dont understand how my BIOS can detect it but no matter which computer it gets installed in, THAT computer goes haywire and can no longer boot normally until it is unplugged.

 

[Eximo]

Speculation, but getting basic info out of it is a little different than giving it commands. SATA controller is probably having issues getting responses back from it and it hangs up the process. It is a serial bus, could be holding the line to 0 or 1 constantly and letting no traffic through. Probably a last second power surge when the battery dropped that damaged it, basically an unsafe shutdown.

Though I agree that should be something the drive could cover given it is a laptop drive.

Only thing I can think of would be to get a bootable diagnostic utility from the hard drive manufacturer and see if a low level format is possible.