Not sure where the rest of this thread went with the posts by the other 2 users with this same problem.  :emotion-43:

I pinged my Dell tech contacts and they'll try to provide some help, hopefully to all 3 users.

And please be mindful of your language on this forum. Otherwise your posts may be deleted, instead of just edited, and your membership in the forum may be revoked for the violations of the forum's terms of use. Thank you.

Ron,  I do not know where the other 2 posts are that were made went either!

I am the orignial request.  Now I need to take care of the issue and was going to try one of the ideas they listed.  Now I can not find it!

Did your Dell tech contacts have any suggestions?

I reseated my hard drive and it worked for now.  However, this did not work over the past week.  

Thanks!

Denise

I pinged my contacts again just now.

I wonder if you just have a bum SATA cable. Got another SATA cable you can test?

The SATA cable is the data cable that goes from the motherboard to the hard drive. That's different from the power cable which goes from the power supply to the hard drive. Your SATA cable may look like this (or be blue), and typically cost ~$6.00.

Caveat:  I make no promises a new cable solves the problem. So you might try to borrow one to try, or buy it from a place that'll take it back for a full refund.

I know this is an old post, but I have implemented over 20 Dell OptiPlex 390 machines and I get the same error: "Alert! Hard Drive Not Found."

Replacing the SATA cable did not fix the issue, in one case, I replaced the Hard Drive, Motherboard and SATA cable on several machines and this did not fix the problem.  I read somewhere that a hard drive firmware may be the fix, did it work for you?

Thanks!

Matt 

Also, in my case, sometimes the PC will be running Windows and suddenly shut off and give this error.  Other times, it will have been shut down all weekend and booted back up and give this error.  In all cases, the solution is to shut the PC off for a minute and power back up and then the hard drive will be detected again and the PC will boot up fine.

I have the Optiplex 745 and am having the same problem.  Only mine will not come back up after letting it sit.  This is the second hard drive that I have had this problem with.  Any suggestions would be great.

I have the Optiplex 745 and am having the same problem.  Only mine will not come back up after letting it sit.  This is the second hard drive that I have had this problem with.  Any suggestions would be great.

Suggest you start a new thread of your own with this problem. Be sure to include the PC model, version of BIOS, and version of Windows .

Be specific about your problem. When does it happen, what's set as first in boot sequence in BIOS etc.

I know this is an older thread, but I wanted to share my "fix" for this situation. I updated the BIOS, and verified that the hard drive didn't need a firmware update. I continued to have the problem, and it was frustrating. I tried a new SATA cable, and tried swapping the SATA port on the motherboard. No luck there either. Finally, knowing the 790 sometimes has power supply issues, I disconnected the DVDRW power connection and plugged it into my hard drive. That FIXED the problem. I've had zero issues since I did that, no crashes, no "No Hard Drive Found" messages. It's been perfect ever since (about 3 weeks). Since I never used the DVDRW drive anyway, it hasn't been an issue.

It's possible the power cable itself is bad, or maybe that connection on the power supply is bad, or even that the power supply itself is not outputting properly anymore. Regardless, the fix worked, so I wanted to report it here in case anyone else wanted to try that as an option. Good luck!