Dell Inspirion 1501 "No drives Found"

[jwut]

Hello All. I found a similar thread through google regarding the "No drives found" error, actually I've been sifting through quite a few forums to find a solution and have not yet been successful.

So, long story short I have a Dell Insipirion 1501 that I'm trying to reformat for someone. When I first turned the laptop on to get a grasp on what the deal was with it, I saw "No operating system found". I thought Oh boy, here we go. So naturally the Bios does not detect a fixed disk, and when I attempt to reformat the HDD I of course get the above error.

Heres a pretty thorough list of what ive done:

-Switched HDD's: I've tried about 5 different HDD's of varying size and brand, all of them the same issue.(none will show a fixed disk in BIOS)

-Attempted to test the hard drive by plugging it up to my other computer. It never detected, which leads me to believe that the drive it came with is dead, but obviously not the problem(or at least all of it), see the first thing on my list.

-Ran diskpart on all 5 drives I have used. Says no fixed disks to show on the "list disk" command

Now on to the last part. I HAVE attempted to load new BIOS drivers, gotten from the Inspirion Dell site. Could the BIOS drivers even help me here? either way, I dont think I was able to load them because(correct me if I am wrong) I need to launch some sort of command prompt at the "Load Driver" screen so I can access said drivers from a flash drive. Could someone help me out and post the commands to load the drivers from a flash drive through cmd? Obviously dont waste your time if its all for naught, It's just one of the fix's ive heard work for people.

Lastly, the drive it came with is a Seagate momentus 5400.3 60g hdd. The Seagate site doesn't really have much information about it, and googling reveals no drivers. Also, the other HDD's I have should have the drivers already installed, or Windows should grab them when its formatting, which leads me to believe that, if its not the BIOS drivers, then it must be something in the connection of the HDD to the mobo, which is pretty much out of my hands.

Pre thanks to anyone who can help, and sorry for the lengthy post, I just wanted to be very thorough in my OP so there wasn't a lot of back and forth posting to find out information.

 

[WR2]

Hello Jwut;

Did Win7 ever run on that laptop before it got into your hands?

How about trying another OS just for fun. Ubuntu Desktop
It's not windows. You can start out running the whole OS on a CD drive without needing a HDD. And then you can try and see if you can install to one of the HDDs.

 

[jwut]

Yes, it had windows 7, then at some point(the person couldnt be sure) it literally stopped working. As far as running ubuntu from a disk, i tried that, too see if i could ever get a disk drive to show up. It did not, which further lead me to believe that it was either a hardware connector issue or the bios drivers. I had seen a post a few weeks ago on a random forum that gave instructions on how to run the cmd prompt to install the bios drivers, but I forgot to bookmark it of course, and has since become un-findable so to speak for some reason.

I'm open to any suggestions though!

thanks

 

[WR2]

Does BIOS ever see a HDD attached?

 

[WR2]

-Switched HDD's: I've tried about 5 different HDD's of varying size and brand, all of them the same issue.(none will show a fixed disk in BIOS)

 

[WR2]

Im leaning strongly toward the damaged connector theory.

 

[jwut]

Yeah, unfortunately it seems that way. Its just one of those things I wanted to test out as much as possible to make sure it was just a hardware issue and not anything else.

 

[WR2]

Have you posted that question in the Storage section of the forums?
They might have an extra idea or two.

 

[jwut]

I have not yet, thanks for the tip! I went directly for the drivers section since the actual error itself is driver related, but ill definitely give it a shot.