My wife's laptop seems to be dying after a coffee spill. They keyboard is pretty much done (some buttons enter 2 letters, some none at all, some repeat all the time) but we hooked up an external usb keyboard to get around that. It's only used at home.

However, after it reboots it also can't find the hdd anymore. That happened twice before yet it started working again after a few tries. Today it didn't want to come back to life anymore. It passes all the internal diagnostics except for no HDD found. I opened it up, took the hdd out, checked the cable and connections and it all looks clean. The spill didn't reach that deep. I put it back in as to get down (or rather up) to the keyboard you pretty much have to take everything apart. Not something I'm prepared to do yet with my ageing eyes and big clumsy fingers.

It didn't help, still no bootable devices. Miraculously an hour ago it finally managed to come back, windows failed to boot last time warning ofcourse, continue. Last time updates installed 7:15am (failed) which caused the reboot and apparent death state. I turned auto updates off for now to prevent it from rebooting again. Updated the last backup and everything seems to run smoothly.

What can be the problem? Why does the hdd have problems starting up after a reboot if everything is fine once it's running?
Is it the HDD or could something be wrong on the motherboard?

If I had to guess, it would be the connector port on the hard drive itself. The hard drive on the inside is probably fine but the connector port might be damaged or it still has some coffee on it that is preventing it from making a proper connection.

The coffee most likely damaged a port or a bit could have potentially leak to damage the HDD as well.

I suggest connecting the HDD to another pc to see if it's the HDD or the port that's damaged.

Sorry for your loss. Liquid spills never bring good

That was my first guess too, yet I took the connector off, all nice shiny pins, nothing to see there. Also no traces of coffee anywhere near the hdd which sits in its own silver wrapping. Underneath the hdd also clear. The other end of the connector on the motherboard looks fine too (frigging tiny connectors in laptops ugh). The connector looks fine, all shiny clean, motherboard on the side I could see was clean too. I'm guessing the coffee didn't get past the keyboard membrane.

My other guess was that maybe the short circuiting keyboard is interfering at the boot process, as when the message comes up it keeps repeating until you hit a key to stop it. I pried some keys off to clean underneath a while ago after it happend, it was definitely there yet trying to clean with limited access didn't help, hence using the external keyboard. That did stop the p from repeating ad infinutum which made it kinda difficult to use :)

Kinda frustrating it has in depth diagnostics to test each memory module in fine detail yet for the hdd nothing but "not found"

The weird thing is, once it's past the very first boot sequence, it's all fine. It's running now, hdd is operating as usual, windows reports all the partitions are healthy. It only seems to have trouble powering up and as long as it doesn't reboot it keeps going. Sleep mode doesn't hurt it either.

Indeed spills suck. I've already picked out a new one, good excuse to switch to 512gb SSD and get double the memory and much faster 7th gen i7, and I guess pay for the spill protection plan this time. Happy wife is important, and this laptop wasn't really up to the task with it's 2.2ghz i5, 5400 rpm drive and 8gb ram, but it will still take 2 weeks to get here. It's a shame though, the thing is only 16 months old.

Maybe the controller board which sits outside the hard drive got damanged.

In most (but not all) laptop, you can just remove the keyboard entirely (and replace it). It should looks like something like that. After you removed it, you can clean further, and test without the keyboard. After spilling some coke, I had to replace it and it went just fine.

SATA controller on the motherboard got wet.

Strip it down, stick motherboard in a 99+% isopropyl bath for a day, let it dry for 5 days, put it back together.

If that doesn't fix it then you'll learn not to turn on electronics after a liquid spill.

Yeah I looked into that. The keyboard is the last thing to come out when taking it apart which doesn't look like an easy job. (Dell Inspiron 7558) Especially since my eye sight close up is pretty bad, and those screws I saw inside when checking the hdd are mighty tiny. It also has one of those fancy backlit keyboards but it should work with a standard one as well.

I'm weighing my options. Spend money on a repair shop, try a new hdd (which is the bigger issue, why can't it reboot normally), or get a better one and try fix it later. I feel about 50/50 that I'm going to wreck it further when I try to replace the keyboard myself... Should have got one that opens from the top as well!

It just passed the hdd tests from Dell Support, no issues found. yay :/

I was so shocked at how hard the keyboard is to remove that I watched the whole video ! On mine, you remove it from the top, very easy. As for your hdd, the chances it is faulty seem relatively small to me : the disks are almost entirely sealed, you can clean the electronic, the HDD test is OK. If you want to be sure, you could try to boot on a live cd (or usb memory) OS (like ubuntu) just to see if the system is properly running with no HDD.

As for keyboard unmounting, if it's just for the faulty keyboard not to interfere, it seems the cable plugging the keyboard to the MB is the blue flat cable with KB written on it and the black on with LB. In your video, at 0:51 you can already see it and unplug it, so it should be much easier (remove the cover, remove the battery, unplug the 2 cables, that's it). If you still have the same issue without the keyboard plugged, then it could be anything else. And if it works, well, you can live with a usb keyboard or perhaps have a cheaper repair at a repair shop as it's just the keyboard, no checking.