How to distinguish a southbridge failure from a hard drive failure?

Question

Iron

Symptoms.
The hard drive is unreadable. Neither when loading Windows, nor Victoria.
And suddenly it began to read, I even installed the drivers to the end.
(There is guaranteed no valuable data there, all digital belongings are on a pocket screw - so there was nothing to save)
Due to lack of time, I did not have time to launch Victoria when everything was being read.
What could it be: a south bridge blade (the whole laptop is to be replaced) or a hard drive failure (a cheap breakdown, no more than 1500 hryvnias)?
(We have a laptop in front of us, so preferably without disassembly)

Answer 1

replacement with a known good one (screw), or connect the screw from the laptop to another machine,
or one of the two ㋛ 50x50
but 1 option is preferable,
the screw is pulled out of the laptop without much hemorrhoids.

Answer 2

All peripherals on the south bridge. If there are problems with the south bridge, then the failure of the keyboard, USB is possible.

Answer 3

It is possible to leave the screw to a sane mother with a removable axis ..

Answer 4

I bought an external hard drive for 1 TB. When connected via usb port, the computer did not see it. Unsubscribed something about GPT markup. He fought for a long time, but the AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition 6.5 program saw him, created a disk, formatted it in NTFS. After that, the disk works fine.