So, there was my laptop, politely minding its own business...

Engine No.9

Grand, it was downloading 2 torrents at the time (Blue Bloods Season 1 & 2 for anybody who's interested), when all of a sudden it shut down and displayed the following message
"Internal hard drive not found. To resolve the issue, try to reseat the drive.

No bootable devices--strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility. Press F5 to run onboard diagnostics".

So I struck F1 and the second part of the message displayed with every strike of F1. So I went ahead and attempted to run onboard diagnostics. This took over an hour. Acknowledged that it couldn't find a hard drive but stated that no issues were in the system

Anybody any ideas?

dashiell hammett

If you press whatever key needed while booting to get you into your BIOS you can see if the computer can still "see" the HDD. Form just what you have reported it sounds like the HDD electronics are shot. But still worth reseating the HDD just in case the connector is the problem.

PrzemoF

Looks like dead hard drive with errors in master boot record (I'm just guessing). Get into BIOS, switch to boot from CD and use a linux livecd to get access to your drive. Get an external drive ready to make a backup.

Fell free to ask for a detailed instruction if you're not sure what I mean.

Engine No.9

Thanks for the advice guys. Having looked at my options, I'm gonna go ahead and replace the drive. I got it up and running, but every hour or so it I get a warning on screen telling me my HDD is broken (something to that effect, its switched off now so can't be sure exactly). I ran the backup as advised but it failed, presumably due to the issue, so I guess New HDD is best bet.

I know I'm gonna have to face reinstalling windows and I have all my recovery disks that I got first day, so that shouldn't be a problem. Will my new HDD have instructions included with how to install or should there be a self loading program which runs once I hook it up and switch it on. Sorry if being a nuisance now, but I'm a tech-buffoon and too poor to get someone to do it for me. Cheers folks.

dashiell hammett

If you have a dell laptop (that sounded like a dell error msg) then just pop in the new HDD and put in the first OS restore disc and set your computer to boot from it thats about it, obviously follow the on screen dialog. With most Dell stuff your restore disk is essentially a Windows OS installation disk that's branded for Dell and shouldn't require any activation once installed.

As well as the Windows OS disc you should have a bunch of app and driver discs depending on what extras you got with the system.

Hang on to the old HDD as anyone with a bit of IT knowledge should be able to connect it up to another system or put it in a USB caddy and pull any data that is left on it.

riclad

buy a sata 2.5 inch caddy cost 12 euro,
do not touch either drive underneath, on the pcb part .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXdA_8H-Oow

some laptops have a metal frame which holds the drive,
drive is held in place by 4 screws ,
open screws,remove drive, put new drive inside frame .put in screws.
dont lose the screws,they are tiny.
its a good time to buy 250 or 500gig drive.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002UZO07C

Engine No.9

riclad wrote: »

buy a sata 2.5 inch caddy cost 12 euro,
do not touch either drive underneath, on the pcb part .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXdA_8H-Oow

some laptops have a metal frame which holds the drive,
drive is held in place by 4 screws ,
open screws,remove drive, put new drive inside frame .put in screws.
dont lose the screws,they are tiny.
its a good time to buy 250 or 500gig drive.

Yeah, just bought a 500gig drive for €70 in pcworld. Not a bad price at all.

Engine No.9

So I've installed the disk and everything appears fine, except for the screen resolution. It just looks a lot chunkier and less defined. Do I need to update my graphics card to get it to look the same as it did before?

I should mention that I've set the screen resolution to its highest setting.

dashiell hammett

pajopearl wrote: »

So I've installed the disk and everything appears fine, except for the screen resolution. It just looks a lot chunkier and less defined. Do I need to update my graphics card to get it to look the same as it did before?

I should mention that I've set the screen resolution to its highest setting.

Try a windows update first and check the section for drivers that you have to choose to install and see if there is a new graphics card or motherboard driver and if so let windows update install it for you.

riclad

Say your graphics card is ati 340L
get the latest driver for win7,or windows xp,
whatever os, you have .
you can go to control panel, device manager, click update driver, on your graphics card .



http://www.pcworld.com/article/190147/Update_Your_Video_Drivers_After_Installing_Windows_7.html