Windows 7 Formatting woes: disk recognition problem

Hi and welcome to the forum

We've seen this particular problem many times, and it's often but not always due to a hardware problem, either a RAM stick or Hard Drive failure. My guess is that if your ladyfriend has had her Dell laptop with W7 on it since day one, that laptop is at least 7 years old going on 8 years old this year. If she has never replaced the hard drive in it or paid someone to do that for her; chances are it's failing or has already failed. And that's the reason it's not showing up in DISKPART. You should know that modern laptop makers only design hard drives to last no more than 2 years in laptops! (no more than 3 years in Desktop PCs). That means it's a very high likelihood it's her Hard Drive that's failed.

The fact that the laptop still boots and runs W7 indicates it hasn't failed completely; most likely it's a SMART reporting failure that's keeping the drive from reporting it's stats correctly to DISKPART. At this point, the best thing you can do is to test both her RAM sticks and Hard Drive per my Troubleshooting Guide available here for free: Windows 10 - Unclickable Task Bar
This guide will walk you through testing of your ladyfriend's Dell laptop in a step-by-step fashion. The Guide is quite long, 6-8 pages depending on your printer settings, and it's best to print it out and have the hard copy in front of you while performing the hardware testing.

Expect this process to take 2-3 days to 1 week. Since you said you had some experience reformatting drives before, I'm guessing you have some, possibly intermediate level of computer skill. If this is the case, more like a few days than the 1 week for novice beginners. You need to be patient when following the steps given in the Guide. It's an arduous process, and many folks I've provided this Guide to here on the forum, never answer back, or just drop off the face of the world so I guess it's just too much for them and they either junk their computer or pay a professional tech to do the troubleshooting for them. Bear in mind, this Guide will provide you with a solution to your problem about 85% of the time, identifying 1 or more faulty hardware components which you then must replace in order to effect a permanent solution.

My Guide incorporates the most used troubleshooting methods I use for my own computer repair business, and techniques I've spent 10 years teaching to Adults in my local Junior College as well as the k12 Adult Ed levels. It also incorporates testing links and methods which the very knowledgeable Admins here on this Forum most often recommend to people who are facing similar problems to what you have in front of you now.

Give it a try.
Remember, you can post back if you have any questions along the way, get stuck or frustrated, whatever. Also, there are NO stupid questions. All of us experts were beginners many many years ago and we understand how difficult computer troubleshooting can be. Lastly, we are here 24x7x365 for you, and we endeavor to answer all questions Posted on the forum within 24 hours (please understand this is not a guarantee, as we are unpaid volunteers, and many of us have day jobs); but we do our best to be responsive. Many of our forum users have told us we are the most responsive tech forum on the web today <humble>.

Best of luck in your efforts,
<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>

Since you stated it is booting, I'd start by resetting BIOS to the defaults and try that. If it still isn't recognizing the disk boot into your current install and post a screen shot of disk management and diskpart > list disk

Righteous, thanks gents. I'll give these a try and get back to ya when I have a clearer picture of what's going on. Hopefully I can power through a good chunk of it by the end of the weekend.

And yeah, the thing is pretty ancient, she's had it forever (wants pretty bad to keep it though, since her recently departed dad gave it to her). I was trying to update drivers on it recently, some of the dates made me shudder. I'd figured if it was still running as it is then it wouldn't be the hard drive, but maybe I'm wrong. I'll start up those diagnostics.

Yes, you're incorrect! I have many computers that come in to my repair shop that seem to be running Windows just fine--for the most part. Except, some things don't work, or the performance is poor, the Customer can't install any new programs, or when their hard drive fails as yours did when you attempting to reinstall her W7 on it. Things like the Wi-Fi dropping off are often indicative of a failing hard drive rather than a corrupted Wi-Fi driver or other windows corruption issues. I also get Customers who have had their computers to 3 or more Techs in my community trying to fix the problem; and not a one of them bothered to test the hard drives out; that's a pretty basic diagnostic for computers. Kind of like in today's cars, an auto mechanic plugging in a diag computer into the plug in the engine compartment to check the fuel mix. They would tell me the other Techs said the Motherboard on their computer was friend and that they should just throw that computer in the trash and buy a new one!! In 9 out of 10 cases, that's not the case. The fact that the laptop can turn on and boot windows and mostly work, does not rule out drive failure!! Period. And, since it's not your laptop, it's quite likely your Ladyfriend has multiple other problems on it she didn't bother to tell you about too. More symptoms of that drive failing if you used it as much as she does. I'm guessing you only had it for a short period and are not nearly as familiar with it as she is.

Another thing you should know, is that that laptop is nearing the end of it's useful life anyway. All laptops except Dells these days no longer last after 10 years. Most laptops from other laptop makers last about 5-7 years if you're lucky! Interestingly enough I have a Dell laptop that's 18 years old that still turns and can work on the Internet--although since it's Win2k (originally W98), it's agonizingly slow and takes 15 min. from turn on to get to a browser home page. In other words, it's not really useable any more. But, it still turns on and still works--I cannot make that claim about any other laptop manufacturer. I'd be advising to tell her she should stick in a drawer or her hope chest in the next couple of years (if you can keep it running that long!) and get a new one. The next big technology change is coming around 2018, and it's doubtful that laptop will even work on the Internet much after that. But, at least if you fix it now, she'll be able to spend some time with it still working.

<<<BBJ>>>