Dell M4700 REBUILD #2 - FAKE Dell Laptop Drive Not Found Error (w Explanation)

Dell PRECISION M4700

Dell M4700 REBUILD #2 - FAKE Dell Laptop Drive Not Found Error (w Explanation)

I cam across a very interesting situation the other day when working on CRAZY, my Dell PRECISION M4700 laptop.  

For those of you who do not know (or remember) what CRAZY is, it's a DELL PRECISION m4700 laptop that I bought out of the back of a car in a Great Canadian Super Store parking lot from a guy operating under an assumed name (no kidding!).

Although it worked OK at the time of purchase, within a month the machine started to exhibit some strange video behaviour, which was resolved by taking it apart and clearing its airways.  Once the airflow was cleared, the problem went away...mostly....

Turns out it wasn't 100% fixed.  It still exhibited problems, but so infrequently that the person using the laptop didn't treat it like a big deal and either waited for the video to settle down, or simply rebooted the machine, at which point the glitch vanished.

About a month ago, approximately a year and a half post-purchase, CRAZY froze one afternoon.  CTRL-ALT-DEL did nothing, the machine had to be "cold" rebooted by pressing down the power button for about 10 seconds.

After that...nothing...the machine refused to do anything.  It didn't even display the DELL logo startup screen at which you can choose to press F2 for BIOS setup, or F12 for boot device selection.  Nada.  It just sat there with the power indicator on.

So I went into testing mode.  One of the things I tried was swapping the hard drive between that machine and a spare laptop I had purchased just in case of this very thing happening.

But it looked like the crash had also corrupted the hard disk in CRAZY (very badly!) because in the new machine the relocated drive WAS NOT EVEN RECOGNIZED.  There was no hope of booting the drive in the new machine, which caused a lot of extra work as applications needed to be re-installed.

There was also the issue of data loss.  There were some important files on that hard disk, so an extra effort had to be made to try to recover them.  So I went to the computer store and bought an external ATA case that I could connect to a working computer via USB.

This solution worked perfectly.  As in flawlessly.  Which made me start to wonder if there wasn't something else going on with respect to my previous troubles when it came to the DRIVE NOT FOUND error that I had encountered with the standby Dell PRECISION M4700. 

So I looked into the situation once again, without the anxiety and pressure of having just experienced a catastrophic hardware failure...and here's what I found:

It's actually possible now to mis-install a Dell SSD into the drive tray for the Dell PRECISION M4700 to the point where it falls under the internal SATA connector, at which point it looks like it has been installed, but in actual fact it is not!  Unlike with previous (thicker) magnetic media, it is possible to fully insert a Dell drive tray into a Dell laptop with a Dell SSD mis-installed to the point where it makes NO physical connection with the motherboard...and not know that you did it!

This video shows in detail how someone (like me) can fall victim to this problem, how to avoid it...and what to check.