No internal hard disk drive found

Question

Hi,   My sister's cat, Ethel Lou, knocked a quart jar of water over onto my Inspiron 2000 laptop.  :smileymad:  My sister and I dried up the water the best we could, took the back off, and dried the inside.  (It had been in hibernation when the cat knocked the water over.)  We had to leave the house for about 2 hours so I left it drying with a fan blowing on it.  We got back and I put back in all the screws, chewed on my lip, and hit the power button.  I came up as it should have (right where I had left it when it went into hibernation).  I'm not sure how it did that as I had the battery out and it was unplugged when I started taking out screws.   All was calm and normal untill I moved it into the kitchen desk, plugged it in, and shut the lid.  About an hour and a half later, I came back and there was fog on the screen and the screen would not come back on.  OK, I thought, sometimes it does this when I leave it shut for too long.  So, I did a hard shut down, but instead doing a normal reboot, it came up with this message:   Device in system modular bay can't be identified.   So, I took out the battery and put it back in.  I also took off whatever that little 3 X 3 black window is on the back and put it back in.   That problem was apparently fixed, but now I have a new problem:   No internal hard disk drive found No bootable devices--strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility.   HELP!!!  HELP!!!:smileysurprised:   Thanks!   banot

ejn63 · Answer

The Inspiron 2000 is too old to repair - you might want to try the drive in a working system (in an external bay) but the notebook itself is history and not worth repairing.

bweed6 · Answer

your motherboard is not recognizing the hard drive. this means one or both components are done. ethel lou owes you a new computer.

banot · Answer

Thanks for the advice and the verdict. It's so nice to be able to post a problem and have several people help you with it within hours. I'm not very knowledgable about computers. I know the basics and maybe a little more, but that's about it. Anyway, an update on my laptop:

My computer is an Inpiron 2200 not 2000 and I just got it direct from Dell last December, so I don't think it's obsolete (it has Windows XP on it). But then maybe technology is advancing faster than I thought!:smileyhappy:

Anyway, I shut down the laptop for another hour or so. I tried booting it again and instead of giving me the hard drive error message it would go through all the motions of starting up, except it would get past the Windows XP message where the little green (or are they blue?) dots are going from left to right. It would go through that for about 5 minutes and then I would get a black screen with a cursor that I could move around with my keypad but I couldn't do anything else.

I kept trying to reboot it and when it gave me the blank screen I'd do a hard shut down. About the 4th-5th time I did this, it finally came up correctly. I am now e-mailing on my laptop!!!

I do have one concern still; when it came up it said it had found new hardware--the CD drive. I have yet to investigate that. Maybe I'll do a system restore later if I start having trouble with that.

If I have any new problems, I'll post it.

Thanks everybody!

banot

banot · Answer

I have a three-year warranty and either one- or three-year CompleteCare, which, fortunately, also covers things like darling little Ethel Lou's misadventures. So, I'll probably be calling Tech support tomorrow. I will backup everything today if I can get the CD drive to work.

Thanks!

banot

ejn63 · Answer

Back up what you need to, NOW. It sounds like there has been damage done internally - you should run the Dell diagnostics on the system and watch it carefully.

Although it's a new system, it's also a low-cost unit - if any major parts need replacement such as the mainboard, you'd be better off replacing it than repairing it. Crazy as it sounds, a replacement mainboard for a $700 system still costs about $700.

banot · Answer

Well, I called Technical Support today. I took out the hard drive and Dell is sending me a box. I've got to send it in for them to fix everything that's wrong with it. My laptop should be home from the hospital in 5-8 days with a clean bill of health.

Thanks to all of you who tried to help me with my...how shall I say it...problem. Dumb cat.

banot

bweed6 · Answer

complete care is a good thing. like ejn mentioned - get everything off the drive that you can. when it comes back it will be clean.

Storage, Drives & Media

No internal hard disk drive found

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