laptop hard drive not found

[jbbray]

I just got a used Inspiron 3700 with a celeron 433ghz, 128mb ram, 4.8gb hd, and was loaded with win2k. Within a couple days, I got a "primary hard disk 0 not found, no bootable devices" message. When I went into the bios settings, there was no hard drive listed, it just said "none". The hd was making some funky noises and I wanted a bigger one anyway, so I bought a new 20gb drive. I flashed the bios to a17 (was a00)so it would read the whole drive then set out to install win2k. All went fine at first, the bios recognized the whole 20gb hd and win2k set up just fine. However, just after intalling the os, I left it alone for a few hours and when I came back it wouldn't come out of suspend mode. So I rebooted and it wouldn't read the hd again, same message. Since then I've seated and re-seated the hd several times with not luck. I've put other hd drives in my laptop and they are recognized fine, and I've put this hd in another laptop and it works fine. I even formatted the hd in another laptop, tried it again in my laptop but no luck, same message. What I thought was a simple hd problem at first doesn't seem to be. I'm at my wits end and I've exhausted my limited knowledge. I would appreciate any help I can get. Thanks.

[John Prophet]

Welcome to the forum!

Hmm, thats weird......you say you already tried another HD in that laptop and tried your HD in another laptop??

Strange.

Have you tried different cables?

If you're having such a problem, I would suspect the system board of the laptop. Especially if you're putting the HDD into another laptop and it's working fine.

[John Prophet]

But he said he also put another drive in his laptop and it worked, lol.

[eagle1]

hmmm.. but if the BIOS was not recognizing the HD, maybe the BIOS is the culprit.

I thought maybe a dead/going dead CMOS battery. But I would've thought other settings would have been noticed that kept getting changed.

I'm not familiar w/ Dell laptops, but Compaq's pop-up a message each boot if CMOS settings have changed and/or reverted back to defaults.

[jbbray]

From what little I know about this stuff, it seems like a bios issue, except for the fact that other drives have worked fine in the machine. In fact, I had an old hd w/win95 in there for several days with no problem. Are there ways to diagnose how compatible the bios is with the drive?

[jbbray]

Thanks for your input EvilRick and John Prophet, you've given me a few ideas. I think I'll gonna concentrate on the bios for now. Please post if you think of anything else that might help.

[eagle1]

Does laptops come with normal batteries like regular motherboards? Or are they soldered on the board?
If they come like the regular mobos, you can just exchange the battery for another one and see if that helps?

[jbbray]

I don't know, I'm new to laptops. But it's probably worth a try if it can be replaced.