suggestions on dying Inspiron 1720

I am having a lot of issues with my Inspiron 1720 (still under warranty), and I've found it's best to have a clear idea of what hardware I want replaced before I speak with Dell tech support. I can't figure out what's wrong so was hoping you might have an idea.

Recently, I had problems with a few ports (USB and power seemed to be loose, and the headphone jack wasn't working), so Dell replaced my motherboard, chassis, most ports/cables, and HDD caddy (cradle).

It worked OK for a while but the HDD performance started to degrade, and now the laptop doesn't recognize the HDD as a boot device at all. I was upgrading my HDD recently (for unrelated purposes) by imaging to an external HDD and restoring to a new drive, and the restore slowed down a lot, to where it took 60hrs to copy+verify 320GB.

Now a couple of days later, the laptop basically doesn't recognize either my old or new drive as a bootable device at all... and I know both drives aren't broken, I've recently tested them and at least one has 0 bad sectors. I get the error, "a disk read error occurred" on boot, and if I run the Confidence Test with Dell Diagnostics, I get the error " "timeout waiting for drive not busy"

If there were an HDD controller separate from the motherboard, I'd suspect that. As it stands, I'm not sure where to go next. They didn't replace the interpolator, but I'd be a little surprised if that were the issue. Your suggestions are very appreciated!

 

It sounds like they need to replace the motherboard again.

 

Perhaps it's the SATA Interface that's have trouble. You may have gotten a really bad motherboard, I would recommend contacting Dell and sorting this out as it was their fault in the beginning.

But if they tend to give you some problems and etc, you can always order a motherboard (it's like $150 for an unused one) and install it fresh yourself. But that'd be up to you, I'd try to contact Dell and tell them the story you are having.

However, in my experience it seems like either the SATA connectors are faulty on the motherboard. If Dell takes your stuff back and tells you it's better you get a new computer, I'd probably ask for my laptop back, purchase a motherboard and send them the bill.