Failure to Boot

[Steve823]

Inspiron 11 3147 2-in-1 w/N3530 CPU
Windows 10, Samsung EVO850 500GB SSD

Late November of 2015 I installed a SSD, upgraded to Win-10. Everything has been working.

Then recently it started giving me problems booting. Sometimes it displayed a message saying there was no boot drive, sometimes it would say nothing and the screen would just go blank with a slight back-light. Multiple attemps at different things such as hitting F-12 and selecting the drive would work. Sometimes the BIOS would say no drive detected, sometimes booting into SafeMode and then re-trying would work. Sometimes just hitting F-2 and going into the BIOS would cause it to work. Sometimes just trying all these different things would cause it to work. On. and on. ad infinitum.......

And then...!!!! No boot drive found. Even when the BIOS would show it. So then to eliminate the SSD as the possible problem, I put the working HDD back in and it gives me the same errors. I can hook either drive up to another computer and neither one of them give me any suggestion they aren't working just fine.

I have run the Diagnostics from the BIOS screen with everything reportably fine. I have run the Repair function from a bootable USB drive with Windows-10 on it and it says it can't fix the problem.

The computer comes on and displays the Dell logo and then goes blank. I'm thinking there is a failure in the computer to "see" the HDD or the SSD.

Anybody got any ideas on this one?

Thanks,
--Steve

 

[ffg7]

ran into that with a customer's desktop as the sata controller was crapping out. switched the drive from sata based to ide & no problems til the ide drive started to develop bad sectors. can't do that on a laptop tho unless you make the hard drive an external using usb. other option is see if there is a newer bios update that might correct this problem.