"No bootable devices"

This is a googlebait post; perhaps my experience an be of value to someone
else.

Dell laptops sometimes refuse to load OS start with the text:
"Primary hard disk drive not found
Fixed optical drive not found

No bootable devices - strike F1 to retry reboot, F2 for setup utility"

Some people [1] assert this as a hard drive failure. This is not necessarily
true.

IME, this error occurs especially after the hard drive has been removed,
changed or if the machine has experienced some kind of shock, like being
dropped.

What can have happened is that the connector between the hard drive and the
laptop has become unaligned. There exists a page of instructions for
dealing with this, though I can't for the life of me find it now, but they
condense as follows (hire yourself a guy to do this if you're not confident
about it yourself!)

1. With the screen closed, remove the 'K' screws on the underside of the
laptop, and the hard drive's screw on the right side of the laptop.
2. With the laptop the right way up, carefully open the screen and slowly
lift up the keyboard at the right hand side.
3. With care, the keyboard can be laid face down over the left of the
machine without stressing the connectors attached to it. The hard drive to
the right is now exposed.

It may be obvious that the disk drive's connector is not pushed in, or it
may not. The best advice I've seen on the web is to ensure that it fits
both the hard drive /and/ the motheboard as closely as possible, and so one
should remove the hard drive from the bay, then bend the caddy around the
connector back so when it goes in, it goes all the way.

However, on one occasion this didn't work for me. It turned out that my
connector could be pushed *too far* into the motherboard's slot: I used a
flat screwdriver to create a little distance between the two, and only then
did the error messages vanish, and the OS could boot.

Cheers all,


[1]
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...s02.tsnz. net
--
Al

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