hard drives Need help - Defective Laptop/HDD - Out of ideas

[DeathBellsRingin]

Hey guys, newcomer here. English is not my first language so please forgive any mistake i will make. 

 

I have been trying to fix an issue with my laptop that had been around for over a year. I invested alot of time trying to fix it, but in the end, i am clueless.

 

So here i go:

I got an Acer Predator Helios 300 15.6 inch. When i ordered it, i bough the option with a single NVMe ssd of 250gb, which had a spare slot for an additional 2.5 inch hard drive. So i purchased a Seagate 2tb HDD 5400 rpm along with the laptop and installed it myself using the provided caddy through the small plate under the laptop.

 

• The hard drive stopped working a few months later.
• I ordered another hard drive, a 1tb seagate 5400rpm, installed it and it worked for some limited time (i do not recall how long) then failed again.

 

For both hard drives, the symptoms were:

• HDD disapearing from the "My PC" menu
• HDD disapearing from the Disk manager (diskmgmt.msc)
• HDD not appearing with various tools similar to Disk manager (Easus Parttion Manager)
• HDD not appearing in the BIOS info menu

 

• I tried many many times to unplug/replug the sata connector from the hdd, which lead to the hdd appearing again for various time lapse ranging from 2 minutes to 1 day.

 

Thus, i though the sata cable might be defective. I contacted the Acer Tech Support, told them about the issue,

• they sent me a replacement sata cable. I opened the laptop and cleaned the connector on the motherboard using alchool and replaced the old sata cable with the new one. Closed everything up and reinstalled the HDD.

Booted it up and now the harddrive worked for about a week, which had not happened ever beside when replacing hard drives months before.

Then it disapeared again. Now i am at a loss, my remaining thoughs are:

• maybe it is an issue with the BIOS (unlikely but possible since the issues started at some point weeks after updating the BIOS)
• maybe the motherboard is defective (unlikely since everything is working right and i never saw a mobo this young not working)
• maybe both HDDs are defective, considering the laptop is moving around alot everyday since i use it both at home and at school and i might have been a little rough with it.

Later today, i plan to test  replacing the HDDs with a 2.5 inch sata SSD i have laying around to figure out if both hard drives are defective, but i tested them with a HDD enclosure and they both worked properly, so i don't know what to think about it.

 

Does any of you have any ideas or suggestions? I take everything 

Thanks for your time!

 

Bells

 

 

[Turtle Rig]

9 minutes ago, DeathBellsRingin said:

Hey guys, newcomer here. English is not my first language so please forgive any mistake i will make. 

 

I have been trying to fix an issue with my laptop that had been around for over a year. I invested alot of time trying to fix it, but in the end, i am clueless.

 

So here i go:

I got an Acer Predator Helios 300 15.6 inch. When i ordered it, i bough the option with a single NVMe ssd of 250gb, which had a spare slot for an additional 2.5 inch hard drive. So i purchased a Seagate 2tb HDD 5400 rpm along with the laptop and installed it myself using the provided caddy through the small plate under the laptop.

 

• The hard drive stopped working a few months later.
• I ordered another hard drive, a 1tb seagate 5400rpm, installed it and it worked for some limited time (i do not recall how long) then failed again.

 

For both hard drives, the symptoms were:

• HDD disapearing from the "My PC" menu
• HDD disapearing from the Disk manager (diskmgmt.msc)
• HDD not appearing with various tools similar to Disk manager (Easus Parttion Manager)
• HDD not appearing in the BIOS info menu

 

• I tried many many times to unplug/replug the sata connector from the hdd, which lead to the hdd appearing again for various time lapse ranging from 2 minutes to 1 day.

 

Thus, i though the sata cable might be defective. I contacted the Acer Tech Support, told them about the issue,

• they sent me a replacement sata cable. I opened the laptop and cleaned the connector on the motherboard using alchool and replaced the old sata cable with the new one. Closed everything up and reinstalled the HDD.

Booted it up and now the harddrive worked for about a week, which had not happened ever beside when replacing hard drives months before.

Then it disapeared again. Now i am at a loss, my remaining thoughs are:

• maybe it is an issue with the BIOS (unlikely but possible since the issues started at some point weeks after updating the BIOS)
• maybe the motherboard is defective (unlikely since everything is working right and i never saw a mobo this young not working)
• maybe both HDDs are defective, considering the laptop is moving around alot everyday since i use it both at home and at school and i might have been a little rough with it.

Later today, i plan to test  replacing the HDDs with a 2.5 inch sata SSD i have laying around to figure out if both hard drives are defective, but i tested them with a HDD enclosure and they both worked properly, so i don't know what to think about it.

 

Does any of you have any ideas or suggestions? I take everything 

Thanks for your time!

 

Bells

 

 

Weird issue, but Ive come to accept this from uncle billy.  So you have a SSD and a HDD and the HDD is botched.  My advice is dump that crummy slow 5400rpm hard drive and buy a 1TB SSD and buy a external HDD for backup or to install games in a lot with 1TB you should be safe with that.

[Droidbot]

I'd say try installing that SSD and seeing if it somehow vanishes again, since that's definitely peculiar behavior.

[Srijan Verma]

if you have an extra pc or a friend with a pc, try installing the hard disks in his computer and see if it works

[DeathBellsRingin]

Thanks for the quick replies, did not expect this forum to be this active. I'll try the ssd to see if it fix it, then test the hdds in my old laptop. I'll give feedback on the results! Thanks again for the replies!

[DeathBellsRingin]

I swapped the harddrive for an old SSD and for now it seem to be working. Time will tell.