Hard drive not found

Hello,

I am a desktop support technician for a large company and we have received several reports of a concerning issue with the Dell Latitude 5400 series laptops that we have deployed in our environment. Many of the users with this particular model are reporting that they are experiencing intermittent blue screen errors followed by the laptop shutting off and displaying an error stating "no hard drive found" when it starts back up.

This issue occurs seemingly at random and affects a good number of users, we can typically resolve it in the short term simply by disconnecting the laptop from power and then performing a hard power cycle, at which point the laptop will detect the drive again and we just need to put it back at the top of the boot order and the laptop boots back up without an issue, but then some time later it will occur again.

It does not appear, at least on the surface, to be an issue with the drive itself, considering it comes right back up after a hard reboot and the issue is shared across dozens of laptops and no issues are found when running ePSA diagnostics. My team and I have tried everything we can think of short of replacing the physical drives, including everything listed in the official Dell troubleshooting for this issue here. We also noticed that on many of these laptops the Windows Boot Manager does not appear in the boot sequence after the issue occurs and it only displays the UEFI SSD which can be selected to boot into Windows. While I don't believe that it should affect the drive functionality, we still tried rebuilding the boot manager option to no avail, and reimaging/reinstalling Windows does not seem to help either.

We are at a loss of what to try next but our users are getting frustrated. It's not practical to put new SSD's in all of these laptops and have to reinstall Windows and get all the users applications set back up if it is not absolutely necessary, so hopefully we can avoid that. I just wanted to put this out there to see if anyone else has seen similar issues with the 5400's and what, if anything, you did to resolve the issue permanently.