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16 Posts
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14860
May 10th, 2010 12:00
Latitude D820 Bootup Problems
Latitude D820. Recently installed a new battery (purchased through Dell). Coincidence?
Issue: When a reboot, I get an error that it cannot. I get "no bootable devices--strike F1 to retry boot, F3 for setup utility, Press F5 to run onboard diagnoistics"
The very first time this happened, I tried F1 several times and the message kept repeating. So I go into Setup and look around. No hard drive was found. I exited - and the system booted up without a problem. I used it for over a week without any problems.
Just recently - had to reboot. Got the same error. Tried F1 again - didn't work. This time tried Diagnostics, which went fine until:
--start dst short test--
Test result: fail
error code : 1000-0141
Msg: No hard drive detected.
I ESC out of there and again - it boots up fine.
Any idea what is going on? I've read various theories - bad keyboards (I rarely use mine.. could it be a sticky key? if so - which?), reseating the hd (not sure what that means.. but I have done anything that should have loosened anything). Or is it the battery causing a problem? Tho, After first installing the battery - and a couple of reboots after that, I did not have any problems.
There is no CD/DVD in the drive. I do have some virtual drives mounted, but have for some time and didn't have problems before.
thanks
*ps* sorry for the double post, but this forum does not lend itself to bumping and getting an answer. I miss the old forum
jackshack
6.4K Posts
1
May 11th, 2010 13:00
To re-seat the hard drive, follow the directions in your manual for replacing the drive, but instead of replacing it, just pull it out a bit and then re-insert the drive into the bay. This action wipes the connections so that if the problem is a bit of oxidation on the metal, it winds up repairing the connection.
If that doesn't help, you most likely have a hard drive that is close to failure. The only way you fix that is to replace the drive and reinstall your operating system.
starl
16 Posts
0
May 15th, 2010 23:00
Thanks for getting back to me, JackShack - *really* appreciated.
I'll try reseating the hd. I'm hoping it's not failure.. shouldn't there be other symptoms?
I'll get back to you once I have a chance to try this. I'm currently working on a crucial project, so won't be able to get to this for a little while.
jackshack
6.4K Posts
0
May 16th, 2010 00:00
If re-seating the drive doesn't help, and also considering that you already have a failure report from the drive, I would say that the drive has failed or is failing. You will almost certainly need to replace it.
jackshack
6.4K Posts
0
May 16th, 2010 12:00
I guess I'm confused; I thought you had a failure report from the drive. If the extended diagnostics can find nothing wrong with the drive, re-seating it should fix the problem. I would think a failure of the BIOS is very unlikely. The short report you mentioned earlier originates at the drive, not from anything on the main board.
P.S. Why not purchase a new drive and an external USB Interfaced drive shell and clone the drive to a new one? If you have Media Direct this is not very practical, but I don't recall that the Latitudes were ever delivered with this feature. In that way your new drive would behave precisely as the old one, you could keep the old one for a back-up, and cloning is much faster than performing a complete restoration from scratch on the new drive. I have used this process several times to save time and energy, and so far it has worked well every time. If you should decide to do this it would be best to do it while the drive still seems to behave normally. After it begins to produce errors it becomes difficult to make a proper clone.
starl
16 Posts
0
May 16th, 2010 12:00
I've run diagnostics on it (it's a seagate, used their tools) and nothing is reported. If it was failing, shouldn't something be reported? I've had drives fail before, but not like this - hence my confusion. Yes, I'm desperately trying to deny an hd failure.
Could there be something wrong with the BIOS?
starl
16 Posts
0
May 16th, 2010 13:00
good news - just booted without a problem! Not exactly *what* did it.. tho, considering the problem was before the OS started, I'm guessing it's the reseating of the hd. I had also stopped the virtual hd from loading - but like I said, that's a windows thing, so probably not an issue. Also removed/replaced the battery.. i know batteries can sometimes cause strange problems.
I'm not exactly sure which error message would have been a failure report from the drive - that's what I mean.
Thank you much for the info on the external USB interfaced drive shell - I was wondering if such existed. At least now I am prepared in case this happens again or if I feel the need to replace my drive.
Again - thank you very much for your help.