Question

Landon starts his computer and receives the error message, "Hard drive is not found." In a panic, he calls you because he did not back up his data and has numerous important files on his hard drive. During your investigation, Landon tells you he was watching a movie on his computer the previous night. What might be the problem with Landon’s computer?

Answer 1

Hard drive might not be detected due to various reasons. Some problem can be fixed only by the hardware engineer or technical person, few other can be fixed by self by “troubleshooting”. The possible reason could be, BIOS might not have switched on the hard drive so it has not detected. Sometimes data cable might be unplugged.

So you can try replacing one another cable. Another possible reason could be virus. Virus might have corrupted all the data in the hard drive. So anti-virus can be installed to rectify this.

Answer 2

We will be taking a lot of assumptions in this question. Assuming that Landan did not accidentally drop his laptop, as a technician, what I would want to check first is the BIOS settings. There are a couple of issues that can cause this error. These issues may include a boot sector virus that erased the whole hard drive, a bad windows installation, or even a loose cable. Before I check on the BIOS settings, I would request him to unplug any external hard disks. He might have been watching his movies from the hard disk and the disk being connected might be the one causing the error. A wrong boot order in the BIOS settings may be giving priority to another boot source disk like the external hard disk mentioned. I should be able to take Landan through steps that he needs to take to make his hard disk priority. I would also check for corrupt sectors by running the inbuilt CHKDSK tool. If these options don’t work, I would consider checking the hardware itself for further diagnostics.