m15 R5, shuts down, says hard drive not installed

Question

Recently bought a new Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5, but have been having the issue of it shutting down on battery power (regardless of the charge) and getting a blue screen saying no hard drive installed. That screen will disappear and I get another screen (picture) saying Hard Drive - Not installed. I'll shut down the laptop using the button on the screen and then restart the laptop. The laptop will restart just fine and resume all my windows I had open. I've tried tech support's diagnostic and repair on my laptop and their system claims everything to be in order. I've also tried chatting with tech support but just get sent links on hard drive issues.

This is my 2nd Alienware product and 2nd time I've hard hard drive issues with an Alienware product. However, the 1st computer is a Alienware Aurora r7 and if I moved the tower, even when powered off, it'd erase the operating system and lose my files. On that desktop I just replaced the HDD with a SDD and things seem to be okay now. For how expensive and renowned Alienware is supposed to be, why is there so many hard drive issues? Anyone else have these issues?

JOcean · Accepted Answer

It is possible that the drive is failing even on a new system. Go to this forum thread for more suggestions.

Aloysius S · Answer

Hi @Ricos Roughnecks, I had these sort of random disk related issues on my Alienware m15 R6 which used to exhibit the same symptoms - all diagnostics come out fine but random restarts and blue screens and sometimes with the harddisk not found message. And dumps are not saved due to the disk not being found.

Finally narrowed down the issue myself to using a Gen 4 NVMe SSD in the Gen 4 M2 NVMe slot 1 of the m15 R6 which was causing the random issues. Somehow the Gen 4 NVMe SSD loses connection. I moved the Gen 4 NVMe SSD from the Gen 4 M2 slot 1 to the Gen 3 M2 slot 2 and the issues disappeared albeit the limitation of performance at Gen 3 levels.

Not sure if this will apply to your situation but that is what I experienced and hope it helps you as that was really frustrating me on an expensive gaming laptop. I am still not satisfied that I can't use the expensive Gen 4 NVMe SSD as slot 1 on the m15 R6 was supposed to be able to support Gen 4 NVMe but was not stable. Have a pending ticket with Dell Support to get this addressed.

Ricos Roughnecks · Answer

Thanks for the info. I will try it if Dell Support cannot figure it out.

Alienware

m15 R5, shuts down, says hard drive not installed

Was this post helpful?