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No boot device available
I have an Inspiron 531 running Vista. This morning the power had gone off. I don't know for how long, but it was long enough that the APC battery my desktop was plugged in to ran out of power because my desktop was off. I turned it on and instead of booting up it gives me this message
No boot device available
SATA 0: Installed
SATA 1: Installed
SATA 2: Installed
SATA 3: None
I had to go to work so i turned it off and it sat for about 4 hours till i got home for lunch where i tried it again, still same thing. turned it off, another 4 hours later came home from work, turned it on (yes wishful thinking mostly) and to my surprise it gave me the screen that says windows didn't shut down properly etc and gives the options for safe mode and normal mode. I chose normal mode and it acted like it was booting up, but then restarted itself and it's back to the no boot device message.
On the advice of a friend I tried booting it with the windows install CD. It boots from that and takes me through the install screens, but it will not repair anything, and if i try to install windows, the only "drive" it comes up with is 7.5 GB which i think is the backup partition. It should be a 250GB harddrive.
Any ideas?????
Edit:
After awhile of giving up I turned the thing on and it came to the didn't shut down properly screen this time presenting me with the option to run startup repair or run windows normally. I did the startup repair and it worked. My computer booted up, everything was there and seemed to work perfectly for about an hour i even restarted it just to be sure. Then a program crashed, the whole system froze and I had to do a force restart. Now Its right back to square one, where i was before with the no boot device available, install disk is no help, and i can't figure out how to get it to the screen that actually fixed it before, though i suppose it didn't really fix it since it later crashed and came right back to where it was before.
Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated.
fireberd
9 Legend
9 Legend
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33.3K Posts
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April 10th, 2010 04:00
The power failure obviously corrupted something on the hard drive, See THIS from Microsoft on Vista Repair. If the hard drive isn't physically damaged from the power failure and does not need to be replaced the Microsoft article should get you going again.
If you need to do a complete reinstall, and the hard drive is not physically damaged, the Dell Recovery Partition, accessed by F8 at initial boot up will restore the PC to the original factory condition (all user data that has not been backed up will be lost).
Back to the UPS. It should be the type that has an interface (connection) to the PC so it can do an "orderly" shutdown of the PC when the battery reaches the "low voltage" point. Apparently either you did not connect this feature to your PC, did not set this up in Vista or the UPS you are using does not have this feature and in that case I would recommend getting a UPS that does have the connection feature as it will save you from future problems.
Mary G
4 Operator
4 Operator
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20.1K Posts
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April 10th, 2010 08:00
Another thing to try is to disconnect the computer from the APC ups unit and plug the computer directly into a known good electric outlet. The battery backup might have taken the surge and failed. Pick a different electrical outlet, too, just in case that's the problem. Check your warranty for the APC unit.
Crysthia
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April 10th, 2010 09:00
I can get it to work for about an hour at a time, after turning it off and on a few times it seems to eventually give me the screen that asks about startup repair, that gets me in. after maybe an hour of normal use, it just completely locks up. stops working all together, i hafta force reboot and it's back to saying no boot device. Is the problem the hard drive or is it something else like a short in the motherboard? (i have very little knowledge of how the hardware works in a computer, it just seems odd that i can get it to work fine for short periods)