dell inspiron laptop hdd problem

pbartlett

I have a Dell inspiron 17" laptop built in 2018. On powering on today I got an immediate message on the screen saying 'no bootable drive found'

the laptop has two drives - a normal 3.5" spinning drive-in the drive day and a solid state P5M22280 in the SSD Bay (this is about 1" wide and about 3" long)

I have gone into bios by pressing F2 and no drives are found. it seems unlikely that both drives have failed at once so I am wondering if it is the hard drive controller that has failed. i have mounted the hdd in a caddy and plugged it into my spare laptop usb port and it seems fine - so that should have shown in bios i would have thought.

I was wondering if anybody has any ideas. I have disconnected the battery and held down the power button for about 30 seconds to discharge things but that makes no difference

Carrot007

Does sound like motherboard failure from what you say.

Have you tried loading bios defaults and resetting up? (has the bios battery failed?)

You can also get a caddy for the SSD if you want (around £15 on amazon). Though be aware they are different caddy depending on if the drive is sata or nvme (I have not got a nvme caddy yet as those are all in machines!).

pbartlett

thanks. will try resetting bios. the failure happened when upgrading to w10 21h2 - the laptop was supposed to reboot as part of the install process but didn't as above.

[Deleted User]

pbartlett said:

thanks. will try resetting bios. the failure happened when upgrading to w10 21h2 - the laptop was supposed to reboot as part of the install process but didn't as above.

Doesn't sound like a hardware issue now you have mentioned that it happened during a Windows update. I'm a bit confused because your first post says it happened when powering it on but then on the above post you said it was during a reboot?

Just for absolute clarity - what shows in this section of the General > System Information > Device Information in the BIOS?



And then what shows in the General > Boot Sequence screen?

pbartlett

The 'boot sequence' screen shows no devices - nothing - not even the DVD drive. The 'drives' screen shows no devices .

To summarise - what happened was that I started to install the W10 21H2 update and went shopping whilst it did its thing. Came back to a shut-down laptop. Pressed power on - instant message - no bootable devices. 

Have been fiddling about - removing everything apart from SSD - no change. THEN noticed there was a box on boot options (BIOS) labelled 'use windows boot manager'. It was unticked. I ticked it and now everything works OK - the laptop booted and started the windows update installing showing percentage etc. After the 'percentage installed' reached 100% the desktop appeared and all seems well.

I have absolutely no idea........

[Deleted User]

pbartlett said:

The 'boot sequence' screen shows no devices - nothing - not even the DVD drive. The 'drives' screen shows no devices .

To summarise - what happened was that I started to install the W10 21H2 update and went shopping whilst it did its thing. Came back to a shut-down laptop. Pressed power on - instant message - no bootable devices. 

Have been fiddling about - removing everything apart from SSD - no change. THEN noticed there was a box on boot options (BIOS) labelled 'use windows boot manager'. It was unticked. I ticked it and now everything works OK - the laptop booted and started the windows update installing showing percentage etc. After the 'percentage installed' reached 100% the desktop appeared and all seems well.

I have absolutely no idea........

Haha, perfect, glad to hear it is ok - but a total mystery as to why that changed though!

J_B

I've noticed that W10 updates do like to alter some settings, but, never heard of anything like this before.

Well done!

johnman4567

i face same problem 

pbartlett

can you elaborate