Hello,
I'm going to be as thorough and specific as possible with this as to make sure that I get the right answer, so here goes: I have an old Dell Studio 1735 Laptop that I got a little while ago from an e-dump. Along with that, I got several others. I dismantled them all and found a hard drive in one that was compatible with the Studio. I plugged it in and booted it up, and I was successful in starting up Windows and accessing the hard drive. I was elated that I had gotten it working, as it would be my first ever laptop (My parents wouldn't buy me one, and if they did it would pretty much be theirs. This was all I could and still can afford to have so DON'T TELL ME TO GET A NEW LAPTOP!). Anywho, the next day I powered the Studio on again, only to discover the hard drive(along with Windows) was no longer detected! I ran the diagnostic from the BIOS and the DST short test came up with the result: warning. Underneath that it said that there was no hard drive detected. The rest of the diagnostic showed all positive results, so nothing was wrong but that. In addition, I was able to boot up a Windows 7 installation disk from the disk drive, but the installation program also showed no available hard drives to download onto. At first I thought maybe the hard drive was just bad, considering it was from an e-dump. I unfortunately forgot about the whole project for awhile but recently decided that it was about time I got the laptop running. I purchased a brand new blank hard drive that had the exact same adapter type, and size. I received it today and plugged it in, made sure the connection to the mobo was secure, and booted up the Windows disc. It still showed nothing on it! I once again ran the diagnostic, and the same result appeared. So now I know it's obviously not the hard drives fault(by the way the drive uses a SATA socket), so I don't know what to do from here. The hard drive seller was rated 5/5 and it was brand new so the drive wasn't the issue. If ANYONE has ANY advice please tell me! This has become very frustrating!
Thank You!