Laptop Hard Drive Problem

I'm trying to fix my girlfriends laptop. She has a Dell Inspiron 8100

Quote:

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http://pcworld.about.com/news/Oct242001id66691.htm for picture and specs

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The hard drive is a hot swapple hard drive.

This is the problem: When I boot the computer, it goes past the bios splash screen and then it gives the error message, "no primary hard drive found".

I have a good deal of experieince with hardware and computers in general.

When I leave the laptop alone for about a day or two and try to turn it on, it boots up to the OS (XP Pro) just fine. Then if I shut it off and turn it back on, the hard drive will not be recgonized.

I tried the live Windows Xp Pro CD, but the Bios won't detect it as a valid form for it to boot from.

I figure that the hard drive is pretty much dead, but I don't want to have to buy another one (since it is not a standard IDE interface hard drive, but a "special" hot swappable one that costs around $100 for less than 20GB)

Does anyone have any suggestions as to other options besides a new hard drive (I'm tight on cash right now, just paid college tuitition).

Other wise, I'm going to have to hope it boots up again, then back up everything to my external HD.

No warranty I take it ? What happens when you fully charge it or leave it plugged in to the power supply ? I'd take it to a shop and let an expert fuck with it, mabye its the battery but they will know for sure . :)

It's fully charged right now, and I've tried booting it with the powersupply plugged in and then with the battery just powering it.

When it does work, the hard drive light flickers to show it reads the hard drive, but when it doesn't boot up, the light is just a solid green.

This weekend I'm going to get a hold of some floppy disks. I'm going to try to update the Bios as a last ditch effort.

Hahaha. I have 70 (800 MB) Cd-rs, like 30 (4.7GB) Dvd-rs and non of what matters, the 3.5 MB floppy disks. haha.

Removable harddrives in laptops are usually a standard drive in a caddy.

From a rarther fuzzy picture in an online copy of the Inspiron 8100 service manual it's looks like a standard drive to me. You may just need the right screwdriver to install a new drive.

O really. hmm I'll take a picture of it this weekend, I have to get my camera.

AFAIK, Inspiron 8100s use standard 2.5" drives. The ones I've seen have had Hitachi Travelstar drives, but there's no reason you couldn't fit any model .

Sorry its taking me so long, I have a couple of midterms this week, I'll definatly have them up by next week