Should I panic now?

i had my laptop for 8 months now, and during that time including today, i had 2 hardrive related crashes. I dont remember which specific programs (it maybe firefox), or maybe it just randomly crashes, but all of a sudden i get a black screen telling me that the hardrive is NOT found... and it auto reboots. upon rebooting, it tells me again that hardrive is not found in the system.

When I reboot, it runs fine again and the hardrive is detected.

does anyone have this issue with M1530's running on samsung 320gb hardrives? is this something windows related or should i call dell to get me a new hardrive?

if dell does send me a new drive, will it have a flash image installed of the windows i have with all the drivers or do i have to manually reinstall everything? that would be a royal pain....

 

That does not look good, it is not windows as the computer is not reaching the point to start looking for it, I would say it is either the mother board or worse the hard drive itself which might lead to total loss of data.

 

they normally send an image drive, but last hd i got had the wrong image, so ask them to ship all the discs with the drive. it isn't that bad to reinstall everything, it is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better to perform a fresh install anyways and can be done in about 2 hours or so, maybe faster if you don't have a bunch of stuff to install

 

They sent me a replacement drive, but its a toshiba MK3252GSX instead of the samsung HM320JI..... i dont know why they sent me a different one, but i am trying to figure out which one is better performance wise, and whether i should keep this one or demand a samsung one.....

any opinions?

 

they send whatever is next in a pile. demanding a particular brand doesn't work

 

well it good that you got a new hd

 

They have a diverse supply of hard drives to ensure that if one manufacturer puts out a bad batch not every notebook they sell will be affected. Plus they probably buy the ones that are less expensive at that given moment.

 

I just oredered the M1530 and it came with the following Western Digital HDD:
Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD3200BEVTRTL 320GB 5400 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Notebook Hard Drive

Maybe you can request a WD drive as a replacement.

 

like i said, you cant request something like that from dell, thats not how they work. i suppose you could request but it is like a one in a million shot

 

My sister had the same exact problem with her 1530. They sent her a new hard drive, but it did not fix the problem. It turned out the hard drive connector (in the motherboard) is the problem. So, they sent a technician who replaced the motherboard. Since then she never had a problem with it.

I think you should first check if it's the hard drive, if not, then let them send you a technician.

 

M1730 has the same issue. I have the WD Scorpio Blue 320 GB SATA II HDD's (2) in my machine. Since it was brand new there have been issues with the boot sector/master boot record dropping out of sight for the bios. "No boot device found. Strike F1 to continue" is burned into my brain forever. This problem comes and goes randomly. Could be twice a day, or a week to 10 days between boot failures. Starting the machine with the Dell MediaDirect button will always load Vista (even though no part of MediaDirect is on my system). MediaDirect loads Vista with only one of my GeForce 8700m GT cards disabled. Once loaded, I use EasyBCD to repair the MBR and it's fixed, albeit temporary.

Dell replaced my motherboard and it did not resolve the problem. All tests run on the drives show zero problems. I have run the drives in RAID 0 and non-RAID configurations trying to fix this. Dell had me make some changes in the bios and that did nothing. The tech support person I was working with was supposed to send out new drives for me to try. Nothing ever came of it. Even though I had a tracking number that did not work, Dell "has no record" of anyone agreeing to send me replacement drives.

Tech support wanted me to reinstall the OS. When I explained I had already tried that multiple times, including a clean install (not a restore from image), they wanted me to try it AGAIN. (What was that definition for insanity? Expecting a different outcome?) Clearly, the people I needed help from don't know what is wrong and they are ignoring me it seems. I called in twice and was told they would research the matter and get back to me. Last attempt to get support was roughly two months ago. It seems apparent that they don't care.

After installing Ubuntu Desktop within Windows, this problem has not resurfaced. I am wondering if there is a timing issue where the computer is wanting to rock and roll before the drives feel like waking up. Maybe having more than one OS in Vista's BCD causes enough delay for the drives to get spun up? I don't know. All I know is I expected a HELLUVA lot more from my $4k from Dell than what I have received.

 

I wouldn't worry too much about the hard drive. So far, the worst drives are maxtors (I've had countless go bad for no reason, and my wife is still about losing her T-6 Texan II photos and videos). Western Digital are the next worst; however, I find WD extremely reliable. I've had several crash, but all because they're moved aggressively or dropped. The rest, I've never really seen much of a problem.

 

hmmm i am really worried about this random hardrive issue now..... granted i only had issues with the hdd not being found 2 times in the past only, but i am afraid that a major component may fail by the time my warranty runs out, and dell will get away with it.

so far since some of you are saying its the mobo, some are saying its the HDD, and i cant recreate the problem, i dont know if replacing the hdd will even fix this issue...

 

thanks for your post.

this happened to mine yesterday and i thought nothing of it. It was the first time and has not happened since.

even weirder, after it happened, it seems my laptop wont sit flat on my desk. it was fine before, but now it seems to wobble like its only sitting on three of the four rubber pads on the bottom. . .