Problem With Laptop

[Risknothin]

My friend left her labtop on all night when she came back the screen was blurry so she turned it off and tried to restart it. When it started the screen came to an error that said

Primary hard disk drive not found
Fixed optical drive not found

Her coupter is a dell inspiron 8200.

I don't understand how this could happen?
any ideas?

thanks

[Maximus359]

Is it still under Warranty? If so dell is ment to have a brillant care service, why don't you shove it back to them to sort out?

[Risknothin]

i believe its past warrenty however some other friend of hers said that it may have fried but could this just happen from leaving your computer on all night?

[tesco]

Originally posted by Risknothin@28 January 2004 - 00:19
i believe its past warrenty however some other friend of hers said that it may have fried but could this just happen from leaving your computer on all night?

ya, if its on all night it might have overheated and some component of the computer might have gotten fried.

[Risknothin]

i just don't understand how it could fry. Hopefully she can just find out what hardware is fried and replace that.

[Maximus359]

Laptops bad desgin from the start, desktop chips thrown into a laptop case. The CPU is to big & get's overheating issues.

Only way arround that these days, is the centrino chipset or the Mobile -M CPU.

If it's fried, then bin it & buy a new one, not even worth trying to fix them. Also if you did fix it, it's only cover for a limit period & if it happens again....BANG more cash at a lost cause.


If i was you i'd suggest to buy a new laptop & get it covered.

[Risknothin]

some one is trying to tell me this just happened and that it had nothing to do with overheating what does every one think?

Overheated or did the hardware just go bad?

[Livy]

my laptop is bascially on all the time using full cpu, running folding at home and i have to overheating probs, same with girlfriends laptop

edit. its a Bloody Laptop, not a labtop!!!

[**GASHA**]

I too have an Inspiron 8200, I found it to be very reliable until I dropped it one day
I also got the "no optical devices attached" error, the only (unorthodox) way I could get round it was to unclip the floppy drive bay and give it a good slam back in. Then it would boot ok (this worked fine for a few months), recently though it has just refused to boot (even from a cd). I've never been quite sure if it was the board or the drive so I'm gonna take it somewhere and try a new drive in it (before I buy it). Try taking the hard drive in/out and also the dvd/cd rom to see if that helps, only 2 screws to remove both.
Dell have excellent support online, I've just been to busy/lazy to bother finding out more.

EDIT: From Dell

The following is a general guide to the causes and possible solutions for this issue.

Firstly, this issue could possibly just be a loose hard drive, and so reseating it should rectify the issue. If the drive continues to repeatedly come loose though, the problem is most likely the connector on the motherboard.

The issue could also be caused by an intermittently working/not-working optical drive. If the optical drive starts to malfunction, it can cause the HDD not to be seen.
As a test, you can try booting without the optical drive in the system and see if you can get the error to occur (without the optical drive in the computer). If the problem doesn’t occur, the issue is very likely the optical drive.

Additionally this issue can in some cases, be caused by misaligned bottom-plastics.

If, after attempting the steps above, you determine what the failing component is (indeed, even if you don’t), you should contact us.

Again, the causes of this problem are so disparate that it is hard to give just one answer as to what could cause this problem.

Message Edited by DELL-Corey on 04-14-2003 01:45 PM