'No Drive Detected' error installing Samsung 840EVO on a Dell Inspiron 1525

I recently upgraded my Inspiron 1525 from a Hitachi 360GB SATA HDD to a Samsung 840EVO 500GB SSD. The Inspiron had previously been upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 Home Premium. The BIOS was the latest Dell provided for the Inspiron and was configured for AHCI and SATA mode. After properly transferrring the HDD data to the SSD and installing the SDD, a problem surfaced when I tried to boot the machine. I encountered the message " Internal Hard Disk Drive not Found" and the boot did not proceed. Ultiimately, I chose the F5 option to 'Run Pre Boot System Assessment.' It failed the second test and gave the error 2000-0141 " No Drive Detected", but continued on to test the monitor and the Memory in various ways. After running that test, the machine directly entered the boot sequence for Windows and successfully completed the boot. Since then it works fine, actually much faster then ever, with no problems. So dispite the error message pushing ahead with the diagnostic routine seems to have enabled the machine to recognize and identify the SSD.

 

The Inspiron 1525 is an old notebook. and the chipset (in 2007 there was the separate ICH8M southbridge chip) doesn't support any SATA interface faster than SATA 2. The SSD, however, defaults to SATA 3. While the SATA interface design includes a negotiation process in which the devices at each end search for the fastest speed supported by both, the BIOS probably is not being sufficiently patient and concludes that no device is connected (or maybe it's only the controller that can change its speed).

You can try setting the BIOS to go through a more rigorous self-test process but, most likely, you need to look for a second hand SSD from around 3 or 4 years ago when the maximum interface speed was only SATA 2.

John

 

My Elitebook 8530p (sata2), nc8430 (sata1) and hp 6720s (either 1 or 2) would disagree with sata spees being the factor here, as all worked fine with following ssds: kingston v300 64gb, crucial m500 240gb (via msata to sata enclousure) and samsung 830 128gb.

First try your new ssd in another pc or notebook. It seems that general incompatibility is at play here rather than just sata interface speed.

 

...or Dells bios is inferior to HPs when it comes to this negotiation.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Agreed on your point.. BIOS seems to be the problem rather then a dead SSD.. It's highly unlikely its dead out of the box IMO... Also darkydark, in all fairness, in your case you had business laptops while OP's laptop is a budget consumer laptop so BIOS support for your laptops was obviously better...