I've been having some major trouble with my Dell XPS 13 laptop. It started showing a pre-boot error saying 'Hard Drive - Not Installed.' So, I assumed the hard drive had failed, grabbed a spare NVMe drive, and installed it. It booted up fine, so I decided to do a fresh install of Windows 11, since the previous system was out of date. The installation went smoothly, but after running a Windows update and rebooting, I encountered a BSOD due to Kernel Mode Heap Corruption. I managed to get it working again using startup repair, then used Dell Support Assist to install all the latest drivers and BIOS updates. However, upon rebooting, the same BSOD occurred, followed by the initial 'Hard Drive - Not Installed' error. I've even reset the BIOS to default settings, but nothing seems to help. Plus, the RAM is soldered onto the motherboard, so I can't swap it out to troubleshoot. Has anyone experienced this before? Any ideas? I'm at my wit's end and jokingly considering taking it outside and smashing it like in 'Office Space.'
2 Answers
Try an SMC reset by going into the BIOS and using the reset to factory defaults function. I recently found that useful for fixing issues like this. If it fails again afterward, it's likely a hardware problem, and I usually just call Dell support for a motherboard replacement.
Have you tried checking if Fast Boot is enabled in the BIOS? I've seen a lot of Dell systems get BSOD or fail to recognize the drive after a reboot because hardware doesn't initialize fast enough due to the fast boot feature.
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