New M1530 - C: and D: hard drives disappear on occasion - hard reboot required

Hi there,

Unhappy new M1530 owner here. I've had the system for three days now, and Vista just screwed up for the second time.

I had left the machine on for a little while. When I came back to it, I see that Firefox complains that something has been uninstalled. When I look at Windows Explorer (or whatever the Vista equivalent is called), I see that my C: and D: drives (OS and Recovery - as provided by Dell) are not there.

Typing "C:" on the address bar returns an error as if I have referred to a drive that doesn't exist.

I was able to put the computer to sleep successfully, but on waking up it stayed on a black screen with a cursor. I had to do a hard reboot by holding down the power button, after which it boots fine.

This is similar to what happened on the first day.

I have done searches everywhere and haven't found anyone with a similar experience.

Is this a bad hard drive? Bad Vista?? Any and all advice would be appreciated. Any tests I can run?

Thanks in advance.

 

On a subsequent reboot attempt, I get:

"Read failure on internal hard drive
No bootable devices"

So I guess it's the drive. FWIW, it was the 320GB Samsung.

Well, that sounds like a waste of time getting things installed on this machine.... Time to call Dell. Not my favourite time of day!

 

Either its a bad drive, or a bad motherboard. Replace both.