Hard drive causing laptop to not start?

ysh5640

Estimable
Jun 27, 2015
2
0
4,510
Okay so i have a friend who spilled coke on his laptop, i took it apart and there doesnt seem to be any corrosion or anything on the motherboard. so i put it back together and tried to turn it on but no luck. i unplugged it, took the battery out and went to take it apart again starting with the hard drive and on a hunch decided to try and turn it on with just the hard drive taken out. it turned on! although it wouldnt go into windows because there was no hard drive but it still turned on. so i guess my question is: is it possible that the hard drive is at fault? will a faulty hard drive connected to a laptop not allow it to turn on? do you guys think installing a new hard drive will work?
 
Solution
Only way to find out if a new drive will fix things is to try it.

Could be an issue with the SATA port also, but first thing to try is a different hard drive. You'll need to install Windows on it though so you'll need to get either a restore disk for the system or a base Windows 7 OEM disk (which used to be available from DigitalRiver but are no longer). Unless you know someone that has one of those OEM disks you will likely need to get a disk from the laptop vendor. It's likely the ISO of the Win 7 OEM disks are out there in torrents or other download site, but because of the fact that quite a bit may be fake or illegally modified, it's not a good idea to search for them yourself.
Only way to find out if a new drive will fix things is to try it.

Could be an issue with the SATA port also, but first thing to try is a different hard drive. You'll need to install Windows on it though so you'll need to get either a restore disk for the system or a base Windows 7 OEM disk (which used to be available from DigitalRiver but are no longer). Unless you know someone that has one of those OEM disks you will likely need to get a disk from the laptop vendor. It's likely the ISO of the Win 7 OEM disks are out there in torrents or other download site, but because of the fact that quite a bit may be fake or illegally modified, it's not a good idea to search for them yourself.
 
Solution