Dell XPS 410 won't boot

Hi Dacaz,

Follow the steps below to go to bios and change the boot priority. Press F2 key during startup to enter system setup. Press Up/Down to select drives. Press +/- to collapse a group Select Drives and change the first boot priority to second hard drive. Reply with your findings.

The bios recognizes the drive and I can access the drive with a win 7 start-up disk via command prompt I tried repairing it and using bootrec and rebuild commands to no avail 

You have to reinstall from scratch with working drives.

DACAZ;

This is probably a silly question, but did you attach your second drive to SATA 0 before you began trying to boot?  The XPS 410 only looks for a boot drive on SATA 0 as the BIOS has no provision for designating a specific SATA port.

Yes I tried that its the only drive in there now and is in the place of the broken one and is wired to sata 0 thanks 

Tried that with new drive and still same issue 

How is the SATA Operation option set in BIOS setup? RAID Autodetect/ATA or RAID?

What response did you get from the Windows 7 Setup when you chose to repair the existing Windows 7 installation?  If that isn't satisfactory, SpeedStep may be correct.  Windows 7 normally puts its start-up files in their own partition unless you begin with a partition made by another version of Windows.  In addition, if you had a dual boot system, the start-up files had to be placed on the drive attached to SATA 0.  I'm wondering if you can't repair it because the start-up file isn't present on the drive.

What I would try, before going to the extreme of reinstalling everything, is make an image of your good drive, then use the Windows installation DVD to install Windows 7 on a new disk, and then restore the image you made to the disk with the new Windows 7 installation.  You will probably still need to use the DVD to repair it once you have restored the image, but maybe you will save yourself some work installing applications and restoring data.

My situation is similar but not identical to yours; I have a RAID 0 with 2 partitions, Win 7 being on the second one.  I had to restore my Win 7 partition about a month ago, and found it necessary to repair the start-up following the restoration of the image.

Another question:  Did your system start out with the SATA controller set to RAID Autodetect/ATA, or have you changed to that during this process?