[mdavidnh]

My Dell Latitude C810 notebook suddenly says it has no hard drive and no optical drive.

Upon boot, the Dell logo displays, the loader indicator gets almost to the end, and then it says:

Primary hard disk drive not found

Fixed optical drive not found

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

This happened out of the blue. One minute it was working fine, the next minute it said it was doing a data dump and shut down.

Now when I turn it on it gives me the above error message. When I press F2 for the setup utility, the BIOS also says there is no hard drive and no optical drive.

I have removed and reseated the hard drive several times. The computer still reports no hard drive.

I tried booting from a floppy to try repairing or reinstalling Windows 2000 and the Windows setup program could not find the hard drive.

The hard drive is not dead. I can access it and read the files with no problem when I remove it from the Latitude and connect it to a different computer.

What can I do to get the Dell Latitude to remember or recognize it really does have a hard drive and an optical drive installed?

Thanks.

Edited by mdavidnh, 23 March 2010 - 12:29 AM.