Internal HDD turned external, won't start Windows

Dec 13, 2018
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Good afternoon,

As this is my first post on any tech forum I would like to apologize in advance for any difficulties, lack of knowledge, or breaches of etiquette I may unintentionally cause or perfom.

My laptop is an MSI GE62 Apache, which I have had for 2-3 years, possibly 4. During this time, I have encountered no problems with its software or hardware, save an audio problem that was likely a manufacturing flaw or was caused in transit.

So what has happened so far is this:

I opened up my laptop a few days ago for cleaning, and noticed that the two plastic struts that connected it to the plastic casing had broken off somehow. Not only were they both detached, but the breaks themselves were very smooth and similar. This caused the internal HDD to become free at one end, and it wiggled and wobbled to some extent.

I glued the bases back onto the casing, put some tape on the edge of the HDD to secure it to the casing as well, then put the whole thing back together after cleaning it.

Last night, which was a few days after the aforementioned discovery, my laptop experienced a BSOD (It was actually yellow, does that matter?) while playing a game. Thinking that this had something to do with a driver update to my GPU (which I had incidentally just installed minuted before), I restarted the laptop and continued on. However, it did mot take long before i experienced a second BSOD (blue this time) and after some consideration and internet searching, decided that it must have had something to do with my internal HDD.

Sure enough, the plastic adapter on the motherboard had come loose and was wiggling about. I took off the drive itself and looked at the adapter, but am unsure as to whether the pins are still intact.

Now, having plugged the HDD into my laptop using a SATA adapter cable, it won't load past the MSI logo and continues to insist that my laptop won't start properly.

My main question is thus: Should it be possible to boot and run Windows normally on a laptop from an internal-turned-external drive connected through USB? And if so, what could be causing my laptop to fail? Corrupted data?

Thank you in advance for your time and, I hope, your advice on the matter.

Scor
 

SkyNetRising

Estimable
Jan 4, 2016
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It is highly unlikely for HDD to be reason for BSOD. What was BSOD message? That one is important and helps to identify the problem.

No. It will not boot this way.

Info from BSOD would help to identify the problem. Without the info you can only guess.
 
Dec 13, 2018
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I apologize for not including the BSOD messages in my initial post.

The first one was colored yellow and gave the stopcode "KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR", and said that what failed was volmgrx.sys.

The second one was colored blue and had the simple stopcode "CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED".

Following these BSODs, Windows would not start, and my laptop booted to BIOS instead.

However, I have confirmed that the HDD's data is not corrupt by plugging it through a SATA-USB cable into another laptop, where I can access the files inside normally.

So then how can I get Windows to boot in this case?

Thank you for your reply, and I apologize for any lateness in mine.