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1997

September 14th, 2016 12:00

Dell Inspiron 15 3542 HDD problem

I turned on my computer this morning and have the following error

"Internal Hard drive not found to resolve this issue try to reseat the drive.

"No Bootable devices--Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 to enter setup menu, F5 for PSA"

I removed and reseated the HDD. I'm getting the same error.

According to the BIOS setup I have a "Fixed HDD Toshiba MQ01ABF050 (500 GB)"

According to the F5 PSA for Hard Drive 0 "ePSA 4236.5 Success All tests passed"

Service Tag

If I go to the setup and change the boot option to "Legacy" from "UEFI" and boot from a USB recovery disk Chkdsk /f finds no problems. Diskpart shows 4 partitions.

I tried to recover the OS from the USB recovery drive and at 99% comes up with an error. "There was a problem resetting your PC" I'm back to the original problem.

Computer Originally came with Windows 8 and was upgraded to 10.

I am currently downloading Windows 10 via microsoft's media creation tool and will do a diskpart /clean and clean install.

I assume this is a BIOS problem since Bios detects it, PSA passes, then appears bootstrap or something does not work. I also can not access partition 4 the recovery partition.

Dell what should I do?

9 Legend

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87.5K Posts

September 14th, 2016 16:00

You can't change the mode from UEFI to Legacy without reloading the OS - and the reload image is made to boot the system in UEFI mode.

When you ran the diagnostic, did you do the surface test (takes a couple of hours) or the quick 10-min test?  If the latter, do the former - you'll likely find the drive is faulty and needs to be replaced.

3 Posts

September 15th, 2016 13:00

I created a startup disk on a flash drive, cleaned the drive using Diskpart, created and repartitioned it, formated it, ran chkdsk /r /v. No problems with the drive. Then I went to Microsoft's website and downloaded Windows 8.1, then upgraded to Win10 (using the accessability page). Everything is working fine right now. Creating a win10 recovery drive and will do a clean install of win10 when it is done. But 8.1 and the upgrade to 10 were working fine after I nuked the Dell partitions. It was not a drive issue. I believe it is a BIOS issue. I saw quite a few posts of people having similar problems. BIOS was running A01. I will upgrade to A14 (I think is the most recent)  when I am done.

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