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2 Posts
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834
June 3rd, 2021 09:00
Inspiron 1545 - hard drive healthy but not detected
I'm diagnosing a non-booting Inspiron 1545 for a friend. At startup it says "Internal hard disk drive not found". When I run diagnostics (F5) it confirms the absence of the HDD:
** Hard Drive - DST Short Test **
Test Results : Warning
Msg: Hard Drive - No Hard Drive detected
I've removed the hard drive and connected it to another PC using a SATA caddy. It spins up and seems healthy - I can read the files on the boot partition.
I removed the battery and replaced the HDD in the Inspiron, pressing firmly as I inserted it, and tightened the screws, but it will still not detect the HDD.
Does this suggest a loose or faulty SATA connector on the motherboard - i.e. a repair job for a Dell specialist - or is there anything else worth trying?
itm60
2 Posts
0
June 4th, 2021 08:00
So I just tried removing the caddy from the drive, to allow me to press the drive more directly into the connector on the motherboard. The drive was recognised, and the laptop started up and did a disk check. Following the disk check (which found no errors), and after a long delay, the machine rebooted but startup failed with a BSOD: "Driver Power State Failure".
When I tried to reboot again it reverted to not being able to detect the hard drive again. I tried removing and re-seating it several times (without the caddy), but couldn't get the machine to detect it at all.
????