Have a look in BIOS and see if your hard drive is still recognised.

If it isn't then you will have to physically remove the hard drive then reinstall it and see if that changes anything.

My gut feeling is that your hard drive has come to an unexpected and sudden failure.

If the drive isn't detected, you may still be able have a pro recover the data, yes. Unfortunately, the service is expensive (figure on $1,000+).

I was also wondering if I could get the data recovered from a dat repair recovery back up technician person, could I then send in my laptop to Dell, which is still covered under the warranty, to get a new hard drive/motherboard/whatever is wrong and causing the problem?

thanks for the quick reply. i ran the F12 and got the error "DST Short Test Faio 1000-0141 Msg: no drive detected". My question is just because the drive is not detected/not found does that mean that my hard drive is corrupt and i can never get the data again? Could I send it to a data back up repair technican and have him salvage the data on my hard drive by placing it in another hard drive? Thanks

how do i reseat the drive? also how do i take out the hard drive?

can you confirm that you have tried reseating the drive?

https://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins700m/en/SM/hdd.htm#wp1084976

Bacillus & ejn63........... i have a thought ..........can you buy the exact same hard drive that has potentially gone bad and have a computer tech rebuild this guys old one if all else fails??          As opposed to going to a data recovery company............. just have some one replace the platters from the old one into the identical new one..................Just a thought

Message Edited by betmen on 10-10-2005 08:11 AM

Doing so requires a Class-100 clean room, which most repair shops don't have.

Then, there's no guarantee without specialized tools that the operation will succeed. In other words: there's a reason why the experts get paid as well as they do.

I have the symptom on a Dell desk computer (which happens to be Optiplex) running Windows XP Professional and get it around the prompt in the following manner: when the screen is still black and white, I press alternately F2 and F12 (it beeps each time) and eventually get a prompt in black in white where I choose "5" System setup. Afterwards I get the F1 and F2 prompt. I wait two or three seconds before I press the F1 and it goes forward and boots anyway! I do this over and over and do not know any other way to get around it so far. Also, right now I will be visiting an Inspiron 1100 which also says the hard drive is not there. My intention is to have the grad student purchase and bring me a 2.5-inch external USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure where I intend to mount the notebook's hard drive to see if (any other) computer can read the drive as external. If so, the student wants me to COPY the data to recover financial and other important files / data.