Laptop hard drive issue -- no boot device found/disk read error

Hodsocks

Posts: 417   +2
I have a Dell XPS 15z laptop, spec. is i7-2640 processor, 8GB memory, 750GB hard drive. The problem is that it often freezes and when restarted it suggests no hard drive, "No boot device found". If I go into the BIOS there is no hard drive, if I boot into the diagnostics screen (F12) and run thr tests on the hard drive it comes up as passed, if I then restart the laptop it will boot into windows 7 Ultimate.
Evertime it freezes it won't boot after a restart unless I run diagnostics then it will start OK.
My thoughts are that it is hard drive, although all tests I have carried out on it suggest its OK, one of the times it booted into windows I ran the Seagate seatools and it was fine.
Anyone any suggestions as to the cause?
 
Sorry, message at start is "A disk read error occurred", not sure if that makes any difference to your thoughts.
I reformatted and reloaded the software to see if that made any difference but the problem still persists.
 
Sometimes when it freezes it BSOD's with Stop error 0x000000f4(0x000000000000003,0xFFFFFA800B2D6060,0xFFFFFA800B2D6340,0xFFFFF8003198660)
Physical memory dump failed with status 0xC0000010
I ran Dell's online diagnostics today and it passed all tests
 
Well I guess its got you guys baffled as well, I guess I will have to bite the bullet and contact Dell and see if they can sort it out.
 
Sorry this got lost in the shuffle caused by the new site software. If you haven't sorted this out yet, I'm sure that the hard drive is the cause of the trouble. What did Dell say?
 
I spoke to them on Wednesday and they agreed it must be the drive and thursday morning an engineer came out and replaced it. Contrary to my expectations Dell impressed me, I suspect some of it was because it was an XPS model because the engineer said they have a 24 hour turn round. So far its been behaving itself.
 
Was a "factory restore" performed on the new hard drive?. Have you applied all the Windows Updates?
 
No mini dumps as when it tried to carry one out it fails for some reason, Dell sent another engineer round this week to replace hard drive and motherboard but still the problem persists. Spoke to Dell today and they have agreed to replace the laptop
 
Back