No Hard Drive Detected

[paul1224]

Hi, this issue relates to a Dell XPS L502x laptop.

We had a blue screen error 0x0000000007A and tried to reboot the laptop but it kept going to the Boot Menu and wouldn't boot from the hard drive as normal.
I done a pre-boot assessment test on the laptop and it came up with an error on the hard drive and seemed to be stating that it can't detect it at all.

The laptop is in warranty so hopefully Dell are coming out to repair but I just wondered if anyone else had these issues before and whether it is likely to be a faulty hard drive or just a loose cable?
If it is a faulty hard drive I'm assuming that there won't be any way to get any of the files from it back?

Any comments or help appreciated.

Thanks

 

[ubuysa]

There are too many digits in your Stop code. Stop codes are 8 hex digits long (4 bytes) and yours has 11 which isn't even a whole multiple of bytes. You can look up most Stop code errors here, 0x0000007A is a paging file error which does gell with your thought that you have a disk error.

In my experience the Dell engineer will be more interested in getting it running again than in protecting your data. One thing you might want to do (although it might void your warranty) is to pull the hard disk out, stick it in a USB caddy and plug it into another PC/laptop. It should appear as an external drive and if you're lucky you can copy your data off there and then put the disk back in the Dell laptop for the engineer to fix.

Dell have a hardware diagnostic tool which is pretty good and very thorough (especially on the hard disk). You should be able to get to this via the recovery partition (F12 on first boot). Alternatively if you go to http://www.dell.com/support/Diagnostics/us/en/19 on another PC/laptop you can download the tool from there, burn it to a CD and boot it to run the diagnostics.

 

[paul1224]

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah I couldn't remember how many zero's were in the error code but it did have the 7A at the end! I am expecting the Dell technician to either reseat the hard drive just in case it has come loose or just install a new one and go on his merry way, getting the documents off it would have been nice but not the end of the world.

Getting to the hard disk with our version of laptop is taking the back off and the keyboard and I don't feel that confident really especially due to the warranty aspect so will leave that to them. The pre-boot diagnostic test does seem to have identified the error so hopefully it will be fixed one way or the other soon.

 

[ubuysa]

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah I couldn't remember how many zero's were in the error code but it did have the 7A at the end! I am expecting the Dell technician to either reseat the hard drive just in case it has come loose or just install a new one and go on his merry way, getting the documents off it would have been nice but not the end of the world.

Getting to the hard disk with our version of laptop is taking the back off and the keyboard and I don't feel that confident really especially due to the warranty aspect so will leave that to them. The pre-boot diagnostic test does seem to have identified the error so hopefully it will be fixed one way or the other soon.

Ok. I hope you get it sorted.