Friends dell laptop wont boot (says the hard drive isnt installed)

[bdelvillano]

My friend got his pc back after his hard drive in it broke 2 times prior to this time. This is the third time that the hard drive in his pc failed thanks to dell. Before he sends it back, AGAIN, is there anything we could do to fix it? Hes already tried opening up the pc and making sure all the wires to the hard drive are connected.

Also, after he tried to do an advanced repair (which failed, obviously), It took him to a screen where he could see all the files on his hard drive, leading us to believe that it didnt fail, and its rather the motherboards fault

(every time he tries to run a diagnostic it says it cant repair his pc)

 

[lolnole]

I think your instincts are correct. If this is the third time, the root of the problem is not hard drive. Do you know if Dell has been replacing the hard drives each time?

 

[bdelvillano]

I think your instincts are correct. If this is the third time, the root of the problem is not hard drive. Do you know if Dell has been replacing the hard drives each time?

Yep, every single time he sent it in they replaced the hard drive, im thinking its a bios update or something but i want to make sure before he updates his bios and then we have 2 problems if that goes wrong.

 

[lolnole]

There should be no issue with updating the BIOS. Some problems can be randomly fixed by BIOS updates. If he has access to another system, I recommend connecting the hard drive to the other system to check if the drive is actually the problem. You can use a disk utility such as CrystalDiskInfo to retrieve the drive's health/status.

https/portableapps.com/apps/utilities/crystaldiskinfo_portable

If the drive actually failed, making it three times, then I am leaning to a problem with the motherboard.