No Bootable Devices

Is this with an 8100?

Suggest you first try removing the optical drive and see if the system will boot. If it does not then try reseating the hard drive.

If reseating the hard drive fails then I suspect that your hard drive is faulty.

Yes it is an 8100.

I have tried removing the cd drive but get the same message.

have tried reseating both the hard drive and the cd rom drive, but no change.

have tried to reset the bios settings to their default values with no luck, using keyboard key sequences for dimension PCs (e.g. turn on caps lock, num lock, scroll lock, the do alt-e, (supposed to get a beep but don't) then alt-f (which does reset my clock to 2002), then alt-b.

any ideas on resetting inspiron 8100 bios to default settings?  could this fix my problem or am I just scr**ed?

 

I have a 5100 that does the same thing.  Any ideas on that.

On the 8100 both the hard drive and fixed optical drive share the same IDE channel so that if anything goes wrong with either device then you get the error message which you are receiving.

Seeing that you have removed the fixed optical drive and reseating the hard drive I can only suggest that you hard drive has failed.

I had the same problem on a 8200. Installed XP with on a new HD and reloaded all my files and programs. I reinstalled the touchpad driver but it never came back up so I used a mouse. Also the Search window kept popping up on its own. Anyway, I finally put it on stand by and the next morning it was blue screen with "no bootable device can be found." Both the Optical drive and the new Hard drive were unaccessible again. Could the second harddrive have failed as well, or is there a way to manually reset the Bios? Now what?

This thought may be way off base. Somewhere (some time ago) on Dell Talk I read about someone who said one just needed to Repair the MBR (I do not know if that advice pertains in these strange situations)

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@BBraxton wrote:
This thought may be way off base. Somewhere (some time ago) on Dell Talk I read about someone who said one just needed to Repair the MBR (I do not know if that advice pertains in these strange situations)

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that is a feasible idea provided the hdd is actually seen in bios.

yeah - unfortunately not the case.  also, i do not have a floppy drive, so with both the Cd and hard drives not seen in bios, I have no way to communicate with the system.

 

I have successfully repaired the MBR on several desktop systems, but had either a CD drive or a floppy drive, so I could get a repair/reset program from the web and run it.

 

I think I will take my lumps and get another hard drive and spend an entire day reloading software and data from backups.

 

Thanks to everybody for their ideas.

 

BTW:  This is about the 10th dead hard drive that I or my clients have had on their laptops.