Dell Inspiron mini - no hard drive - check cable

[adboughton]

Hi folks, seen a few useful posts around here ... I have an Inspiron mini, excellent little machine, but after joggling around in a train froze while on and would not shut off. Removed power & battery but when switched on cannot seem to recognize the 16 GB solid hard drive, and the error msg says 'Cannot find O/S - Check Cable' ... reseated drive, no result. Looked in Setup mode, hard drive shows as 0 ... any experience, anyone? Drew

[mjdodd]

most error messages go a long way back to DOS and are not always what they seem. check cable is just about the only thing that in the past could be an error... however not being able to see the OS nowadays is quite another matter! This error can be produced by

No boot sector on the hard drive (solid or disk)
A corrupted boot ini file
a corrupted disk (in the first sector of the disk)
A failed formatting of the disk
loose connections
The bios telling the machine to boot from another device and only from that other device (used when hard disk is not available etc)
If running windows NT then a bad NT loader file (NTLR file)
and it could be failure of the addressing chips on the motherboard that pass data to the disk.
Tyhe MBR (master boot record) if using windows could be corrupt and therefore not allowing the processor access tot he rest of the disk to find the windows files;

The way I have tried to use the EEEC PC when such items happen is to use either a USB stick with an OS on it or an external CD /DVD/Hard disk ,to enable me to see what is actually happening in the MBR area. The windows restore from a windows installation CD can correct this;

On some minis there is a factory reset by either BIOS or hard switch (through a pin hole) and this might cure it but you may lose data;

M

[adboughton]

Dear M,

Thanks for the excellent advice, it all makes sense now, with the ancient DOS message being a little misleading. Will try to reboot using another PC's O/S with a USB connection ...

Drew