Strange notebook hard drive issue

[Hunter97321]

I am currently working on a Dell Inspirion E1505 notebook computer. It has a 120GB SATA Fujitsu hard drive. First bootup it tells me hard drive is not recognized. I pull the drive and install it in an external enclosure and the drive works fine. I get no errors and can access all the data. I install it back in the notebook and the notebook boots up correctly. I leave the room and come back to BSOD. I didn't pay much attention to the error. Powered it off and rebooted and I get an unmountable boot volume error. I take the drive back out and install it in the external enclosure and it works with no errors. I uninstall and put it back in the notebook this time the laptop can't see the drive I get an error saying "No bootable devices" I hit F5 for Dell diagnostics and the drive can not be detected. Put it back into the enclosure and again it works fine.

I have pulled drives from nonfunctioning notebooks before and found that in some cases I was able to access the drive with an enclosure as I can this one.

Questions:
Has anybody else seen this happen? More importantly I would love to know why this happens.

Is it voltage/amperage related?

Is the hard drive bad or is there something wrong with the notebook?

I could replace the drive and do a reinstall but, if it doesn't work then I've wasted my customers time and money. I tried to search for an answer before posting the question but my results were not successful, Maybe I just didn't search correctly.

 

[vacunita]

Sounds to me, like the hard drive connector on the laptop's motherboard has a problem. If the drive can be seen in an enclosure without any problems, then its most likely functioning o.k.

To be sure you could run the drive manufacturers diagnostic tools on the drive.

however I think your problem lies in the laptop's connector, of course the only way to make sure, is either install the drive in another laptop, or try another HD in the problem laptop.



----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[MonkeyX]

If the MBR is corrupted or damaged the notebook may not recognize the drive as it is the only one. In the external drive enclosure windows can often find and read it. I have had this happen more than once. However, I would backup everything on the drive ASAP as usually the MFT starts to become corrupted and the windows will no longer recognize the drive as formated. I have two different drive that have done this and after running fdisk /mbr and a full format the drives have seemingly fixed themselves. You could also try running something like spinrite on the drive to see if the drive itself is going bad.

Vacunita could also be correct in that the drive connector is going out but the only way to check that is with a different drive. Or int hte case of my gf's Dell, there is an adapter that goes on the drive to connect to the mother board. I have found out the hard way it is quite east yo connect it backwards as the one in hers is not keyed nor is there anything that said Pin 1 or the like. Luckily it didn't damage anything.