Case Study — Laptop Hard Drive
It booted for two seconds. Then nothing.
A Lenovo Yoga 2 13" would power on, run for about two seconds, then switch itself off. The cause was a failing hard drive — one built into a case so thin it needed a connector we don't often see.
The case
Two seconds of boot, then silence.
The laptop came in with a simple but alarming symptom: it would power on, run for around two seconds, and then shut itself off — every time.
That kind of instant, repeatable shutdown points away from a software problem and toward hardware refusing to cooperate. Diagnosis confirmed it: a faulty hard drive was preventing the laptop from booting at all.
What we found
A hybrid drive in a 5mm case.
The Lenovo Yoga 2 13" (not the Pro model) uses a 5mm-thick Western Digital hybrid hard drive — a mechanical drive with a slice of flash cache built in, squeezed into a case thinner than a standard 2.5" drive. That thinness comes with a catch: it connects through a non-standard SATA adapter rather than a normal drive connector.
Without the matching adapter, the drive can't even be attached to recovery hardware, let alone imaged. We had the correct adapter already in stock, which meant the recovery could begin immediately rather than waiting on a part.
The result
Data back within 24 hours, then upgraded to SSD.
With the right adapter in hand, the data was recovered from the failing hybrid drive in under 24 hours.
Given the drive's age and its failure, we recommended replacing it rather than reinstalling the original — specifically an M.2 solid state drive, which carries none of the moving parts that caused this failure in the first place.
The data recovery came to around £110. A new hard drive was around £90, and with fitting and a full reinstall, the total for everything — data back, new drive, laptop rebuilt and ready to use — came to £250, backed by a full year's warranty on both the labour and the new drive.
A drive that dies seconds into boot is still often fully recoverable. Get a straight answer on what's wrong and what it will cost before anything else is tried.