HELP: Inspiron 1525 won't boot

My cousin has an Inspiron 1525 laptop which has had an issue of booting. Randomly one day she received the following message, "Internal hard drive not found. Reseat hard drive". It also said from below "Boot to CD by pressing any key" that the "BOOTMGR is not found".

I received the laptop in this state. I booted from the CD (Windows install disc) and was able to reinstall Vista. I then updated all the drivers and had everything working like a charm. I thought I had hit jackpot with an easy reformat. After about 4 hours of having it running perfectly, as I was installing Windows updates, I received the "Internal hard drive not found. Reseat hard drive" message. Now I cannot boot into Windows and booting from the CD no longer works.

Here are some of the specs:

T2390 Dual Core 1.86Ghz
2GB RAM
160GB SATA HDD

Is the hard drive dying? Is it the SATA controller? The motherboard? Anyone have any ideas or past experiences?

 

Try scanning the drive with HDTune? What does the SMART data say?

 

How can I do this without being able to boot into Windows or even from the Windows install disc? It just hangs at the Windows Vista logo with the progress bar when booting.

 

Do you have like a USB/SATA adapter? Or a laptop with an eSATA connector?

I know you can do the HDTune scan via USB or eSATA, but I'm not sure about accessing the SMART data.

Else, the 1525 might have a built-in HDD diagnostic tool in BIOS. Or, if you know what type of HDD you've got, you can also try to make a bootable CD with the manufacturer's own diagnostic tools.

 

I'll see what I can do with that and post my results.

 

What's odd is that after I posted, I never got the "Internal hard drive not found. Reseat..." again, but I just hooked up the drive to my USB to SATA adapter cable and it failed to install the driver for it on Windows 7 Ultimate. I could never get it to show up.

 

If the drive doesn't show up under you USB/SATA bridge, it's almost certainly dead. Probably was on it's last legs when you re-installed...

 

Sounds like the drive is dead. I have seen that error on a few other dells,but the problem was caused by a dead onboard controller. However, since the windows install cd sees the hard drive and the hard drive isn't working in a nother pc seconded towards HD failure.

 

Okay, thanks for the help! My fear is that it's the onboard controller so I would rather not buy a new hard drive only to find out that it's not the hard drive.

What's odd is that I tried the bridge that it recognized the hard drive at first but then failed to install the driver for it. Would that mean that it still possibly has life?

Another odd thing is that now I try to boot the PC from the hard drive and it just hangs there at the Windows GUI loading screen. The exact same thing happens when I tried to boot from the CD as well. Think it's still more than likely the hard drive?

 

What exactly is the "Windows GUI loading screen"? As far as I know, you get two different sequences of screens when you boot from a Windows install on an HDD and a Windows installation disk?

What happens if you boot from CD without the HDD installed?

 

Here's the GUI Boot screen:


It hangs on that screen and the progress bar continually "loads".

I haven't tried booting it from the CD without the HDD installed. I'll try that tonight after work.

 

I just tried booting it from the CD without the HDD in it and it now loads completely to the Install Windows screen again. I just find it odd that I could not get it to even load past that GUI loading screen on either the HDD boot or the boot from the CD after it died on me during my installation process.

 

My 1537 also occasioanally gets stuck at the GUI screen above, actually it has done it the last two start ups. I then have to to turn it off, then go into the start up repair mode where Windows 'fixes' the problem, and the laptop starts up fine afterwards.

Is this a common error, and is it hardware related? My laptop is about 8 months old.

Thanks in advance.

 

So, I'm thinking the hard drive is the problem, however, I don't want to get them to buy a new HDD and then have that not be the problem in the end. The fact that the hard drive could not install on my PC makes me really think it's dead.

Suggestions for a notebook hard drive? I have never bought one for a notebook before, heh.