Inspiron E1505 "No hard drive found" error

I have an older Inspiron E1505 that has been updated with a T7400 CPU, 4Gb RAM and a new SATA III Kingston 120GB SSD, I have Win 7 Home Premium activated and running on it.

The laptop recently started failing to boot with a "no hard drive found" error. In testing, I have found that re-seating the drive results in a successful boot to Windows. After a few minutes (less than one hour), I find a "no hard drive hit F1" error on the screen.

The SSD drive works fine in other machines or in an external case. I can plug it into any other machine and read and write to it no problem. I have been able to recover all data from My Docs and Favorites. I am confident the drive is working properly.

I suspect the motherboard in the E1505 but I don't know how to confirm the failure.

Running the F5 diagnostics, the hard drive test fails with a no hard drive found error, everything else is great.

Any suggestions or comments on likely root cause and best fix?

I know this unit is old, it is my parents machine and has been extremely reliable till now. They are not interested in adapting to Windows 8, hence the load of Win 7 HP on the machine.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or comments.

 

Does it exhibit the same sort of problems with other SATA drives - SSD or HDD?

 

When I first got it from him, I tried another SSD and had the same problem. I tried the original SATA HDD and the bios failed to detect the drive. At this point I was suspecting the motherboard.

I put his SSD back in and this time it booted fine. I started testing to see what would cause it to fail but have not been able to reproduce the issue for a couple of days now.

I downloaded a pc stress test and have had it running for nearly 24 hours now. The fan comes on periodically but it keeps working. Task Manager shows 100% CPU utilization and the test is supposed to exercise the HDD and video also. I have tried rebooting several times and it keeps working fine. I have shut it down and turned it back on and had no problems. I have removed and reseated the drive a couple of times and still no problems booting up.

Now I am wondering if there was simply some dirt in the HDD connector or something like that. It is frustrating because I feel that as soon as I ship it back to my Dad, it will start misbehaving again. I am going to keep it running for the week and see what happens. I was hoping the stress test would heat things up but it does not get as warm as I expected it to.

Thanks for any thoughts or suggestions.

 

That would be my suspicion if everything works fine now... I assume you've tried reseating the drive (or other drives) and failed to reproduce the issue as well?

 

Yes, I have removed and reseated the SSD several times this week and each time it boots to OS quite cheerfully. It has been running all week, I have restarted it several times and powered down and re-booted it several times in addition to removing and re-installing the drive. So far it has behaved exactly as one would desire, with grace and aplomb, no hint of an issue anywhere.

Tomorrow it goes back to Dad. If he calls to say it won't boot I will gnash my teeth in frustration and begin to wonder what he is doing with it.

 

So, as expected, When Dad got the machine back, he set it up in his office, connected all his peripherals, turned it on and dang it, he saw the No bootable drive error.

His setup includes a passive (no separate power supply) 4 port USB hub plugged into a rear USB port in the laptop. Plugged into the 4 port hub he has the old drive in a Kingston enclosure and an inkjet printer.

When he unplugged the printer and the Kingston enclosure, leaving the USB hub plugged in, the machine booted up just fine. Plugging the devices back in after the PC booted did not cause any issues or problems either.

In the bios, USB is set as the third priority for bootable devices.

Is it just coincidence that unplugging the devices resulted in the machine booting successfully? Thanks for any thoughts or comments.

 

The machine continues to experience intermittent failures to recognize the drive. The machine is typically left on all the time, he discovers the failure in the morning typically. Rebooting the machine does not appear to resolve the issue. Removing and re-seating the drive does seem to allow the machine to boot to windows.

I recently found a note on Kingston's site stating that their SATA III drives are not designed to be backwards compatible to SATA I, only to SATA II. I wonder if this is part of the issue.

This is driving me nuts. I am not sure whether to replace the motherboard or the drive. Oddly, replacing the motherboard is cheaper, probably because the unit is so old.