Dell Laptop not detecting hard drive

[DamianTC]

I have a Dell Inspiron 5579. A few weeks ago I powered on the laptop and during boot, it went to the Dell Support Assist and ran a system scan. The scan finished with the message: “No bootable devices were found. Possible causes could be a corrupt OS image or a boot device is not enabled in BIOS setup”. At that time I entered BIOS and could still see the 512GB hard drive. I didn’t have the time to look into it more and powered the laptop off. Today I had some free time so I powered the laptop back on. Dell Support Assist ran again with the same message. I opened BIOS again, but this time it is not showing a drive.

Would someone be able to give me the troubleshooting steps to take for this issue. I will be happy to give any additional information that is needed.

Thank you for any help,
Damian

[Bruce]

What’s the age, about 6 years?
First thing to blame would be the hard drive.
Can you take it out, put it into an external enclosure or another PC and see if it gets detected then.
Another option would be to get a Linux distro installed onto a bootable USB stick, change your BIOS to boot from USB first, and with that Linux USB connected, see if you can access the drive.

[DamianTC]

I have other laptops, so I could remove it and put it in an external enclosure to see if another system can read it. The drive is a 512GB SSD. Is there any particular enclosure you would recommend for this? Thanks for the reply.

[Bruce]

In my experience, an enclosure is an enclosure, all built equal.
Plus, they are always good to have around, so if you don’t already have one, it will be a worthwhile investment.
Not only in this exercise, but you can use one for backups for example.

For me, once a drive becomes unreliable, it’s time to either ditch it , or at least relegate it to lesser duties, like whack in into a media library server, or security camera recorder, or a backup medium.
So perhaps consider getting a new one, a larger one, and reinstalling Windows on the new drive.

[DamianTC]

I have one on order. I will report back once I have the SSD enclosed. Thank you

[veeg]

Do you have a time line for the order ?

[DamianTC]

Do you have a time line for the order ?

Saturday

[Bruce]

Any progress?

[Bruce]

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