M11x-R3 DEAD (hard drive failed) at 11 months!!

Yup, JUST IN TIME before the warranty expired.

I started up my computer and BAM: "no bootable device". Hard drive cannot be found in BIOS, and won't show up on the system diagnosis. All my precious data and notes from school are gone.

My experience with Dell customer service has been quite poor as well. I purchased the laptop from another individual and did the warranty transfer, and have the confirmation email to prove it, but Dell won't honour it. They said that only some of the information was changed, and because of this, they can only do it if they speak to the original owner. Pathetic. Luckily, the previous owner is not a (unlike the service reps) and will likely give me his info, or call in for me.

But regardless of these warranty issues, it is quite disappointing that this harddrive couldn't last even one year with occasional use. This causes me great pain and is a massive waste of time. I can only hope some 3rd party company can recover my data.

I would highly recommend other dell users with the 720 gb HD to back up their data !

 

Did you try to troubleshoot?

I mean take the HD out, connect it to another machine using an enclosure, or reseating the HDD, resetting the CMOS battery, etc?

Your data might not be gone.

 

Its official, Dell sucks! {roll eyes}

I second the idea of confirming if the drive is dead. It might be connectivity or controller type issues.

 

fixed

It's not like it's Dell fault if the Western Digital hard drive failed. If your motherboard would have broke OK but HDD no...

 

ssd is the way to go.. ;D

 

one of main reasons, after SPEEEEEEED, to getting an SSD was this... even with free fall sensors etc. etc. mechanical HDDs die soon in laptops, i haven't had one in a lappy survive over 2 years, and after a year if not sooner they start getting really sluggish, getting bad sectors etc.

Now HDDs are only in my external storage HDD enclosures, copy what i need rest stays there... i figured this configuration will last way longer, rather than replacing the 500gb+ HDD in the laptop almost yearly.

after half a year the thingy says 93% of life still left in the HDD, so i guess it should last unless mr. Sandforce kicks the bucket...

Anyways, look at people's signatures, probably half got SSDs installed you wont be sorry for getting one.

 

HDDs die. Dieing within a year doesn't mean anything. If they are going to die prematurely, they just as easily could die in a month. The vast majority of HDDs I've had die happened within the warranty period of the drive, and I've had at least 20 HDDs die on me in the last 13 years. They source the drives from various manufacturers. You can really only consider Dell's reaction to the issue when judging them.

 

same happened to me, except it was 1 year and a half later.
good excuse to upgrade to an SSD

 

Another consideration - the hard drive itself may be under warantee from the manufacturer. A lot of hard drives have the details printed on the drive's lable, and others have enough info on the label that you can find out on the manufacturer's website.

You may not have to deal with Dell at all.

Before doing anything, do some diagnostics. As stated earlier, it could be a component failure on the motherboard, or in the interface, and the drive could still be OK. Not a high probability, but it does happen. Heat is the enemy of all things electronics - chips as well as hard drives.

Well worth doing the extra checks in case you could recover your data - which becomes impossible if you have Dell swap out the old drive and it is gone.

 

No harm checking but OEM drive warranties are usually different. [never had a lappy drive failure ]