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no boot device available when I disconnect E drive--inspiron 530s RAID
Hey, can anyone help me with this "no boot device" problem?
When I disconnect the E drive and leave the C drive in place, my inspiron 530s won’t boot up. Instead, I see a black screen saying “no boot device available.”
How do I start this computer with only the C drive connected?
The computer came with two hard drives, each one a western digital 250GB. I have vista installed on the C drive and use the E drive for storage. I want to disconnect the E drive and use it for something else. But the machine will not boot up with the E drive disconnected.
When I bought the machine, dell had configured the twin western digital drives as RAID 1 (mirroring) devices. About a year ago, dell tech support walked me through the steps required to disable RAID (I wanted to use one of the drives for storage and disliked the RAID configuration). As best I remember, RAID was disabled via the Integrated Peripherals screen in the bios. On that screen, I selected IDE (it previously had been set to RAID). I have been using this setup for about a year. It seems to work fine.
With only the C drive connected, I get the “no boot device available” screen when I attempt to start the machine. If I press F12 during startup (i.e. the boot device menu), the bios can see that there is only one hard disk—that disk is connected to sata-1 and it is number one in the boot priority. I also tried connecting the C drive to sata-0, with similar results. And, yes, I am sure that the C drive with vista installed remains connected to the computer (to double check, I put the drive into an external sata dock on another computer and looked at the drive contents).
Help! Why won’t the machine boot with only the C drive plugged in?
system details:
Inspiron 530s
Vista home premium 32 bit, latest updates
BIOS version: 1.0.18
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33GHz
Northbridge Intel P35/G33/G31 rev. A2
Southbridge Intel 82801IR (ICH9R) rev. 02
Memory Type DDR2
Memory Size: 4096 Mbytes / 667 MHz
Display adapter: Radeon HD 4350
Drives: (2) WD Caviar SE / 250GB / 7200rpm
C3PO5
2.7K Posts
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February 9th, 2010 09:00
Hi
Boot your Vista DVD like you are going to do a clean install when you get to the install now screen look to the lower left you will repair my computer click it and see if the repair will fix the boot manager , you may have to select repair my boot for it to work,
The reason it did not boot to C:\ maybe you had a dual OS at one time on the other drive that is where the boot manager was installed ?
Good Luck
C3PO5
2.7K Posts
0
February 9th, 2010 11:00
Hi
In disk manager right click on C:\ and select mark partition as active then shut down and change C:\ to sata 0 disconnect E:\ see if that works for you .
If that does not work press F12 to boot the Vista DVD when you see the Dell logo then go to install now and select repair my computer lower left it should fix the boot manager .
The you can connect the E:\ drive to sata 1 to use it.
Good Luck
cardboard22
8 Posts
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February 9th, 2010 11:00
Okay, let me make sure I understand this.
You are right about the operating system. When RAID 1 was turned on, the two 250GB drives mirrored each other—so each drive included the vista operating system.
However, as things now stand, the only copies of bootmgr.exe are found on the C drive—bootmgr does not exist on the E drive (I checked both drives using locate32.exe).
When I look at vista Computer Management, in the Disk Management section, this is what it says:
Disk 0 Drive 2 (E:) 232 GB NTFS Healthy (Primary Partition)
Disk 1 (C:) 232GB NTFS Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
…by the way, each of the drives has a 55MB partition listed in Disk Management
For the E drive, it says this: 55MB Healthy (Active, EISA Configuration)
For the C drive, it says this: 55MB Healthy (EISA Configuration)
… does it matter that the E drive is the active one?
I had some trouble understanding your instructions about repairing the boot manager with the vista installation disk. Could you say that again?
Thanks for the help!
cardboard22
8 Posts
0
February 10th, 2010 12:00
Hey C3PO5,
Well, what you said worked, and I'm able to use the computer with the E drive removed.
After I had marked the C drive as active, plugged C into sata-0 and disconnected E, when I booted up, I saw this message: "BOOTMGR is missing.' This was new; I had never encountered that message before.
It took a few tries, but eventually the 'repair my computer' link on the vista install screen fixed the problem-- the startup repair details list indicated that 'Boot manager is mising or corrupt' and reported that 'Repair action: file repair.'
Thanks for the help! Couldn't have done it without you.
p.s. Any idea why this bootmgr problem was revealed only when I attempted to disconnect the E drive?
C3PO5
2.7K Posts
0
February 10th, 2010 12:00
Hi
I am happy your computer is up and running :emotion-2: .
What i think is E:\ was set to active but the boot manager was on C:\ when you removed E:\ and connected C:\ to SATA 0 it corrupted the boot manager thats why it took the repairs to restore the boot manager thats what i think went wrong .:emotion-18:
Good Luck