hard-disk drive failure on dell inspiron 530s

aandadailey

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Nov 11, 2013
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i have a computer (DELL inspiron 530s) that recently has been saying hard disk drive failure when i try to start it up. it gives me the option to press F1 to continue or press F2 for setup. when i press F1 to continue a black screen will eventually pop up and say

No boot device available press ENTER key to retry

SATA-0: Installed
SATA-1: Installed
SATA-4: None
SATA-5: None



im not very experienced at working on PCs. thought about taking my DELL latitude D610 laptop hard drive and hooking it to the desktop to find out if the hard drive has gone bad or if something else happened when i replaced the power supply. or maybe its something else i dont know really. like i said im very inexperienced when it comes to PCs. when i replaced that PSU that was the first time i had ever opened a PC up and worked on the inside. any help would be greatly appreciated
thank you
Aaron

PS. my wife was the first to experience this happen while i was at work. she said she didnt know what to do. but i guess it eventually did boot up completely after a few trys. i dont know if she kept hitting enter to retry or if she kept turning the PC on and off until it eventually worked. not sure what she did but she said that she didnt mess with any of the settings. i havent had the same luck. i have tried turning it off and on a few times and hitting enter over and over again but still get the same results
 
Solution
When you power on, you should get a splash screen that says "Dell" or something, maybe "inspiron".. anyway there should be a number of "F" key prompts at the bottom of the screen. Follow the prompt for BIOS. Once you've opened BIOS, see if your HDD is being fully recognised. You should be able to get some information from that, size, name, port ect. Confirm that this information is all correct.

If you got an installation disk with your PC, try booting your PC with it inserted. Then follow the prompts to repair your windows installation.

If your computer has genuinely suffered a HDD failure, then there isn't much that you can do but replace it. You may be able to salvage some data from it but you'll have to do that at a later time.

aandadailey

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Nov 11, 2013
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some1 gave me the pc. when they gave it to me they just told me that it needed a new PSU. they never mentioned what had happened to it. no i havent tried running the windows startup repair. how do i do that?

it has also been working for days after i replaced the PSU. we have watched movies on youtube and other web surfing. when i replaced the PSU the first thing that i did was wipe the PC to its original factory settings. i think its called a full PC restore. it worked fine before that just had alot of stuff on it from the previous owner. worked fine after i restored it also (after hours of updates lol). oh yea the dvd rom was jammed shut. got it to come out and put a dvd in it to see if it would work and it didnt. i think i remember it slowed the PC way down also but wouldnt play dvd. not sure if thats helpful info. just tryin to give all that i know about this pc. (which isnt much since i have only had it for a few weeks)
 

Szyrs

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Aug 28, 2013
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Boot from your windows installation CD.

It sounds as if your PC had no operating system on it when you got it though, is this the case? If so, then there really is no boot device connected and you need to install an operating system. The previous owner may have formatted the drive in order to erase their personal data...
 

aandadailey

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Nov 11, 2013
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it has VISTA. we have used the PC before this happened.
 

Szyrs

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Aug 28, 2013
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18,810
When you power on, you should get a splash screen that says "Dell" or something, maybe "inspiron".. anyway there should be a number of "F" key prompts at the bottom of the screen. Follow the prompt for BIOS. Once you've opened BIOS, see if your HDD is being fully recognised. You should be able to get some information from that, size, name, port ect. Confirm that this information is all correct.

If you got an installation disk with your PC, try booting your PC with it inserted. Then follow the prompts to repair your windows installation.

If your computer has genuinely suffered a HDD failure, then there isn't much that you can do but replace it. You may be able to salvage some data from it but you'll have to do that at a later time.
 
Solution

aandadailey

Honorable
Nov 11, 2013
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10,510

how do i go about seeing if the HDD is fully recognized. is that in the integrated peripherals? i dont have an installation disk either. can i test to see if the computer will work with another hard drive from one of my laptops? was wanting to be sure that it was the hard drive that has gone bad and not something else that is wrong. i figured if i could just test to see if it will work with one of the other hard drives out of one of my lap tops, then i could be sure that it is the HDD before i invest in a new one. didnt know if that would be possible or not.
 

Szyrs

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Aug 28, 2013
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It depends on your BIOS, perhaps in boot priorities? Sata devices? I don't have a Dell handy but even the same manufacturers often change their terminology. You'd just have to poke around but try not to save any changes you might accidentally make along the way.

Since you have access to other laptops though, why not take this drive out and try it in another laptop? If you can plug it in as a secondary drive, that would be ideal. Any major fault should be immediately apparent but there is a whole host of free diagnostic software available, also chkdsk in windows..