The hard drive not installed error is an error message that appears when on the pre-boot environment. This error cuts off your OS access, leaving you with only a handful of troubleshooting methods.
When the computer starts, BIOS comes into action and tries to check and initialize every component involved. For the booting process, it asks for OS-boot files from the boot drive(hard drive here) to load them to RAM.
But, if anything comes between this communication of BIOS and the hard drive, it declares the mentioned error.
What Causes Hard Drive not Installed Issue?
A hard drive can experience logical glitches making it unresponsive and unrecognized by the laptop. Some other causes of laptops not detecting hard drive problems include:
Solve Hard Drive not Installed Issue on Laptop
Rebooting your laptop once can likely fix the issue if it’s experiencing some temporary glitches. But if it doesn’t work, power cycling is a more effective method which is given below, along with other solutions to the issue:
Power Cycle the Laptop
Sometimes the I/O devices and components within your PC become unresponsive because of an immediate halt of all the running processes. This seizure can arise due to various reasons, most probably sudden power cuts or shutdowns.
To fix such a problem, you may perform a power cycle. It will help drain the charge out of all the components and will let them initialize to their default state for a fresh session. Follow the steps mentioned below to do so:
verify if it resolved the issue.
Use OEM Specific Tools
Many PC manufacturers provide diagnostic tools to scan and troubleshoot the discussed kind of errors. you may search for pre-boot diagnostic tools for your laptop’s brand on their specific website.
But this issue is found to be concurrent among the Dell laptops, so we’ll be listing the specific steps in their diagnostic tool. The steps for Dell’s diagnostic tool are as follows:
If it doesn’t fix the issue, the probability of physical damage to the hard drive is high.