HP Laptop Issue, help!

My girlfriend and I were using her HP laptop (running Windows 10) to watch a movie on Amazon Prime using Firefox.

Windows had been booted and had been running all day for her work. In fact, she used the laptop to finish some of her DuoLingo prior to us deciding to watch a movie.

As we were setting up the laptop and connecting it to the TV via an HDMI cable, the screen suddenly went black and showed the "boot device not found" error.

I checked windows for errors via sfc/scannow and it found and repaired some. I also ran chckdsk. But that found no bad sectors.

Has anyone had a system do this to you after Windows had already booted rather than during boot up as it is posting?

I will get her specific system specs from her later tonight.

I just want to see what the possible situations might be. Thank you.



Here are the specs:

Specs:
HP - 14" Laptop
AMD A9-Series - 3.1 gigahertz
4GB DDR4 SDRAM 1866 megahertz
AMD Radeon R5 Graphics -
128GB Solid State Drive PCIe
Windows 10 Home in S mode

Bastet said:

I would test the hard drive with Hard Disk sentinel trial:
https://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_sentinel_trial.php this will give you a visual representation on the health of the drive.
You can also double check to see if the drive is fully connected inside the pc.

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Yes, I thought to check to see if the SDD is fully seated. Just hadn't been able to because she has been on vacation. Thank you!

Bastet said:

Keep us updated once you have the chance to check the drive.

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Hi, I checked the drive using the HP diagnostics. too.l In fact, I ran tests on practically everything. They all passed. I received a battery error of some sort on a power source test, but I am unsure what that means as of yet.

HD Sentinal is showing the drive health is good, but I can't do a surface test scan for some reason. Pretty sure I am running it as an admin.

I checked the HP Diagnostics update - their website detects the laptop and suggests certain Windows OS versions. The current version is 21H2, but that is not one of the options they give if I want to bother updating the bios or anything like that.

Thoughts?

Bastet said:

If HD sentinel shows ‘Good’ then that’s fine.
If all connections have been checked & they are tight/fitted then I would download Macrium Reflect & create their boot USB, then boot the PC with this & choose fix boot problems from the Other option.

Macrium Reflect Free Trials

Macrium Reflect - Incredibly powerful software that allows you to create and schedule effective backups

www.macrium.com

If the PC is dusty I would take this opportunity to clean it.

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Thank you! Your help is much appreciated! I have not yet cracked it open to check. It's the last step I am going to do really since it's a laptop. Not familiar with the internals of this HP model, so I don't want to break something by being accidentally careless.

georgeks said:

"Windows 10 Home in S mode"....Oh ***... ..not that thing again...

You cannot run any applications on that system except from MS Store unless you get out of S mode-but then you cannot go back again.

That means you cannot run HD sentinel or ANY OTHER applications except the ones from MS Store.
(Have you consider going out of S mode?)

Anyway, go to the HP site here.

Enter your S/N and then go to the Product page.
Find the Maintenance and Service Guide.

This will give you PRECISE instructions on how to disassemble your system.

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No, I just posted the specs from the purchase invoice. It's not running in S mode now.
Ah, thanks. I will check there first before I go dismantling.

I will let you know when I get a chance to work with her laptop again. that will be next week. So far, there haven't been any other issues with it. Just the one incident. I will post the test results and crack it open to see if the SDD is seated properly. After that, I am not sure what else to do. Thanks for the follow-up on this! I appreciate it.