No Hardrive Dell Inspiron 5785

okay thank you will download today and get back to you. later today . ...

TV2 said:

I know this is a contradiction, but this free program here:
TreeSize Free - Quickly Scan Directory Sizes and Find Space Hogs
will allow you to see, graphically, exactly what it is taking up space on your hard drive.

You can ask here what the things are that create the largest blocks of space and we can tell you what they are, whether you should delete them or not, or what you can do to reclaim space. Please don't delete anything unless you know what it is and what it does.

Very often the prime suspect is a hibernation file, or an unusually large amount of restore points.

okay will try that tonight and have the camera ready to start in morning ... 2 years old , would it need a battery already yes perhaps ? okay will come back to you in morning ...thanks to you all....

TV2 said:

A failing battery can do some strange things to a laptop. And batteries near end of life can drain off on their own.

I'd like you to try a test tonight. If possible, remove the battery completely, plug in the charger, and just run the laptop off the charger (no battery). Turn it off at the end of the day like usual but leave it plugged in.
See if it starts and operates normally in the morning like that.
Starts normally, no problems = bad battery causing problems.
Starts with same problem = battery fine, it is something else.

kittenwoman said:

Attachment 124049
My laptop ie 2 years old. bought with windows 8.1 and updated to 10 when it first came out . My hard drive has disappeared , can anyone advice me please ..?
every night i put it off and morning Ive no battery left . Battery good so isnt shutting down. So when i put on in morning with plug out i get a hard drive error .. No hardrive . Please help me

Hi there

Why not simply get a new HDD -- laptop HDD's are really cheap these days - and actually on an older laptop using say an SSD will really make that old system fly.

When your computer is working image the OS and restore to an SSD (or HDD) - connect to computer via SATA-->USB connector -- can be got really cheaply from amazon etc.

It's usually really simple swapping HDD's on older laptops -- it's all but impossible though on modern ultra thin ones though.

Cheers
jimbo

Ive deleted a mountain of stuff yestreday and this is the drive now. Still red yet there is not a lot on this laptop. I will run the proggram below today and see what that says.. thanks :)

TV2 said:

That is good advice above.
Try and move or remove 50 or 100GB of stuff off the drive to backup. This should make the red "getting full" bar for drive C: in Devices And Drives green again. It may also give enough room for Windows to close down properly.

Is that red bar the problem you have? Or is there another problem with using the drive?
If the C: drive was not working your laptop would not start up into Windows.

TV2 said:

I suspect you are going to find a few really big system files that are taking up a lot of space.
A Terabyte (1000GB) of data is A LOT of data. A user could only accomplish that by saving hundreds of 1GB movies or millions of 5MB photos.

Deleted quite a bit more today . This is what I have for now.. you will probably see something i dont...

Morning . Left plug in all night without battery . Started no problems this morning . So new battery ?
If the plug is in though wouldn't it start without battery or not as power is on ? Thanks , feeling Im getting there ,,

TV2 said:

A failing battery can do some strange things to a laptop. And batteries near end of life can drain off on their own.

I'd like you to try a test tonight. If possible, remove the battery completely, plug in the charger, and just run the laptop off the charger (no battery). Turn it off at the end of the day like usual but leave it plugged in.
See if it starts and operates normally in the morning like that.
Starts normally, no problems = bad battery causing problems.
Starts with same problem = battery fine, it is something else.