Hi,

To start off, I've loved my X51 for the ~3 months that I've had it, when it worked perfectly, so I hope somebody can help me on this issue :)

I bought the i5 X51 in early June with a GT545, 1TB hard drive, 8 GB ram, everything else standard. I've never installed any new drivers, or any OS, windows update is turned off, never replaced any parts or opened the case, etc. It's laid in the same place in my room since the day I've gotten it, essentially still in factory settings. I use it primarily to play games and it did that well enough, so I've never seen any need to do anything else. Games are pretty much the only thing I have installed on the computer besides basic office applications, and I haven't installed anything or changed any settings recently.

It worked perfectly until this morning - when I went to turn it on, it said "internal hard drive disk not found." I googled the issue from a laptop, found a couple threads on this forum and followed the suggestions, but nothing's helped so far:

- Tried booting from a Windows 7 CD, didn't help - I could get to the windows setup sceen but it doesn't see the hard drive.

- Pressed F2 at alienware splash screen, went to boot options, made sure it was on UEFI (it was), tried again and it didn't help, togged the setting to legacy and back to UEFI, still didn't work.

- Made sure it was set to boot from hard disk in the boot options screens, tried booting several times, still kicks me to the same "internal hard disk not found" screen. 

I would really, really appreciate it if anyone could advise me of additional options, or if any Dell/Alienware support could advise. Unfortunately I work a very demanding job as a corporate attorney, and the only real free time I have is one or two hours late at night every day, so my opportunities for live assistance (e.g. calling tech support on the phone while next to my computer, or getting a tech to actually come over) are extremely limited.

Thanks.