Also, if I press F12 to go straight into the "Boot Device Menu" & select the "Onboard or USB CD-ROM Drive" option, then I get a different error message that the "Selected boot device not available - strke F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utiltiy".

You have done every thing I would have done. However, one thing is missing.

Have you double check that the CD drive and make sure it is working properly?. I strongly suspect that the laser om the CD is out. if you have another drive handy you can swap them and try again.

The DVD laser,  if it is a combo drive, may still working. Try to copy your boot disk into a DVD and try that way.

Did you setup the RAID L1 few years back by yourself and the same Windows CD?

Howdy, yes I setup the original RAID L1 several years ago with the same Windows CD.  Which is what makes this so peculiar to me - that I have booted and installed a very similar setup.  Maybe it is because, the new drives are SATA II vs SATA I in my original setup, but from what I have read onlien SATA II is supposed to be backwards compatible... hmph! =)

[quote user="mtabernig"] Have you double check that the CD drive and make sure it is working properly?. I strongly suspect that the laser om the CD is out. if you have another drive handy you can swap them and try again.

Earlier, I tried to sub in another CD drive I had, but got the same error... you did bring up a good point that it only seems to try and boot from the primary CD drive, so I am going to try and change the dvd drive to be the primary and disable the other drive.  I will let you know, thanks!

[/quote]

HALLELUJAH!!  I unplugged the CD drive & set the DVD drive to be the Master & it recognized the boot CD!!! I am so excited that I would jump around if I wasn't so worried about the boot CD being disturbed ;-)  Cheers!

Wow, that's cool :emotion-2:

regards,

mybesteffort -0%

Have you double check that the CD drive and make sure it is working properly?. I strongly suspect that the laser om the CD is out. if you have another drive handy you can swap them and try again.

Earlier, I tried to sub in another CD drive I had, but got the same error... you did bring up a good point that it only seems to try and boot from the primary CD drive, so I am going to try and change the dvd drive to be the primary and disable the other drive.  I will let you know, thanks!

Hi Imapulse,

Did you setup the RAID L1 few years back by yourself and the same Windows CD?

I suspect your Windows CD does not have the SATA Drivers.

Can you confirm the tools you are using supports SATA Drives installation?

regards,

mybesteffort - 5%

Saw there were a lot of threads with this same heading, but none of them seemed to be specific to the issue I am dealing with. I have a Dell Dimension 8400 with BIOS v.A02.  For the past few years I had this system configured with a RAID L1 setup with two WD Caviar 250GB SATA drives.  I was running out of room, so I decided to backup my data and upgrade to a RADI L1 setup with two WD Green 1TB SATA drives. Setup the drives through the Intel RAID configuration utility into a system partition (RAID ID 0) & a data partition (RAID ID 1).  Unfortunately, the PC doesn't ever recognize the bootable WinXP cd.  I always get an error that "No boot device available - strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility". I've tried reverting to the BIOS default settings, installing a different CD-ROM, rearranging the boot order so only CD-ROM & USB are enabled, and even disabiling everything except the CD-ROM drive... furthermore, I was also able to boot another laptop from this same CD.. nothing seems to work & I am getting extermely frustrated!  :emotion-12: Any help on why the BIOS isn't recognizing the drive would be greatly.  Based on the various things I have tried, it seems to be a BIOS specific issue. Thanks! JMH

Hey there buddh , funny cause im years late but I tried to upgradr to vista and I got same freakin problem and than , after reading what someone said about the backwards compatibility in the but up bla bla blah it turns out it might not be cause my friend gave me a w7 cd that he created ( as in he created the boot up) with the old bootup thingy and it worked!

Kind regards