BleepingComputer.com: Dell Boot Problem

Help. My father in law bought a Dell computer at Wal-Mart. I didn't think to write the model number down but here's what happened to it. He was working on it and the computer froze up. He turned it off and then powered it back on. The Dell screen came up then it came up with the following:

No Boot Device Available
SATA 0 Installed
SATA 1 Installed
SATA 2 None
SATA 3 None

That is all it will do. After the Dell screen you can hear the hard drive start to spin then it stops. I'm not sure but I thought the hard drive may be trashed. That's why I put the topic here. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated

Greg (Stratomaster)

Personally I would take it back to Wal-Mart as long as it's under warrenty and get a new one. How long have you had it? When you say working on the machine you mean software wise?

Thanks for the reply. It's my father in laws computer and he records a lot of vinyl records to wave files and then makes cd's of them. He also plays a lot of solitaire so that was probably what he was doing. I'll ask him if it's under warranty or not. Do you have any idea what the actual problem is ? Thanks.......Greg

I don't know what happened when the system froze...but turning it off may have corrupted the MBR.

The first thing is check all connections to/from the drive. Then I would see if I could get into the BIOS/Setup...and ensure that the drive is properly detected there.

Then I would probably run two commands (sequentially) from the Recovery Console: chkdsk /r first...then fixmbr or fixboot. If chkdsk /r could not run to completion, I would run a manufacturer's diagnostic on the hard drive.

I would then retry booting.

If I still could not boot, depending on the error message...I would probably run a manufacturer's diagnostic on the hard drive.

Louis

a friend of mine bought a dell from our walmart the ones on feature right now for just shy of 500. sayin the same thing to him he froze on youtube then it freaked out like you're sayin. forgot about it until just now. I'll ask him tonight if anything we threw at him worked or not.