Fix for Primary Hard Drive Not Found/Optical Drive Not Found

OK Guys.  I may have a solution for some of you experiencing the Primary Hard Drive Not Found/Optical Drive not found error at bootup that comes and goes, but I think though your symptoms might be the same as mine, there is more than just one root cause of the problem.

Last night, I was listening to CD's with my Inspiron 8100 (Warranty expired about a month ago.  lol), and suddenly everything got really slow, then a Hardware Failure popup started popping up.  I would hit ok, and it would just pop right back up indefinitly.  Eventually this turned to the blue screen of death.  I thought, no big deal, I'll just restart and everything will be ok, it is windows, after all.  WRONG.  Wouldn't boot up.  Just gave me the error most of you are getting...  Primary Hard Drive not found, Optical Drive not found blah blah blah.  Well, I hit f2, and low and behold, Primary Drive lists none in setup.  WHAT!  Well, being persistant, I tried booting several more times before giving up and going to bed. (I didn't sleep well)  The next morning, I get to work, and proceed to make myself look stupid.  I go into the break room where several co-workers are gathered, pull out my lap top and ask "Have any of you seen this before?".  I turn on the computer and, would you believe it, it boots up normally!

Well, I take it to my desk, plug it up, and start working.  About 15 minutes later, he same darn thing happens again.  I turn it off, get on my desktop, and start researching the matter...

I eventually came to this forum, and read all its messages on the subject.  Some of you said you didn't here your fan going anymore, ant thought it might be an overheating problem, so I cranked up my laptop (It cranked, luckily) and ran some relatively intensive apps to see if the fans would go.  Well, they didn't.  Didn't take long for everything to shutdown on me again.

My first assumption was that maybe the fan connections had come loose, but I wanted to be sure.  I downloaded this fan utility http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html and managed to install it on my laptop before it crashed.  Well, the fans work through the utility, but not on there own.  So, for me, keeping this utility running in the task trey seems to have solved my problems, but what would really be nice is to not have to run some third party fan utility for my Dell laptop to run properly!

Anyway, to sum up for those who just want to skim this messages for my solution...

Download this utility: http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html

Install it on your laptop, and keep it running in the task trey.

This will allow your fans to operate properly, avoiding overheating, which seems to be the cause of my Primary Hard Disk/Optical Drive failure at boot up, and intermitten crash to the blue screen of death while running.

Jake