A solution to notorious Primary Hard Drive Not Found/Optical Drive Not Found

Guys, if you experience this issue with your Inspiron as I did with my Inspiron 8200, most probably the hard disk caddy adapter came loose from the motherboard. Nothing's wrong with your motherboard/IDE controller or hard drive.

Even if you DID try to reseat the HDD and it never worked it doesn't mean you need to pay Dell $1100 for a new motherboard/replacement or $100 for a new hard disk when they are still working.

1) Inspirons (and Latitudes) have two IDE channels - primary and secondary ones. Primary HDD and fixed optical seat on the primary IDE channel. If either device fails, the other one will not get recognized by some versions of BIOS. Let's assume your fixed optical drive is fine. Just make sure to remove your CD-ROM/DVD or whatever you have and try to reboot your notebook. If the problem persists, it is not your optical drive that causes the issue. Put your optical drive aside and forget about it for a while.

2) If you can boot from a floppy disk and pass Dell diagnostics test (I realize that you will not be able to test hard disk and optical drives), you motherboard is fine.

3) On initial boot, press Ctrl-Alt-D to run IDE test. If you see only two messages separated by a blank line - "Primary IDE" and "Secondary IDE" - it means that your hard drive doesn't get picked up by BIOS. From these two messages, no way you can infer that your hard drive has failed. BIOS simply doesn't see it, this is what it merely means.

However, if the message mentions HDD failure, it's a different story. It's probably time for you to be looking for a new HDD, unfortunately.

4) I know you've reseated your hard drive already. Are you sure? Maybe not, depends how you define "reseat". Probably you only TRIED to reseat, but did it blindly - the way I was doing it myself, initially. I will give more precise instructions than just "to reseat" - it worked for me and might work for you as well.

I believe that the issue is caused by the HDD caddy ( http://www.parts-people.com/images/products/caddy800.jpg) and HDD slot on the motherboard –they flex easily as they are nothing but tin boxes. Apart from that, hard drive itself can move along the hard drive caddy and get a bit deeper into it – that all will lead to intermittent contact between the HDD adapter and motherboard adapter.

First, I removed the keyboard and tried to reseat the hard drive to see what was going on. There is no need to disconnect keyboard cable from the motherboard, you can lay the keyboard panel upside down on the palm rest; the idea is to be able to see the HDD slot on the motherboard. When removing the keyboard, you might want to use this link to Inspiron 8200 user guide on Dell support server: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins8200/en/sm_en/keyboard.htm#1084976

Without the keyboard I was able to see that the male HDD pin/knife blade adapter did not come close enough into the female motherboard adapter, the gap being quite visible. I took the hard drive out of the HDD caddy and bent the caddy side on the adapter end slightly forward (towards outside) and so the slot on the motherboard. Then put the hard drive back into the caddy, adjusting the HDD and securing screws so that the pin/knife blade adapter outstands from the caddy as much as possible. Do not forget to check if the adapter sits tight on the hard drive as well.

After this simple procedure my hard drive/motherboard adapters got connected properly. You have to verify it while the keyboard is still removed.

A little piece of advice – do not move your Inspiron around with the LCD open. The case flexes and HDD might come loose eventually.

PS
Apart from the caddy issue, I found black spots/dents on the back side of the keyboard panel and the palm rest. Looks like this damage was done by arcing, I used some scotch tape to isolate the critical places. Not sure it did/going to do any good.

PPS
Before you mess with bowels of your notebook, always disconnect AC cable and the battery.