[SOLVED] Dell XPS 8500 No Boot Device Available

[David_jr]

I-7 processor with 12 GB RAM, Win 8.1 installed. Purchased by my father in 2012. Sat new in box in his office for 5 years until Dad passed away and I took it out and tried to set it up for my mother. On first boot it crashed so I purchased a rescue restore USB drive from Dell and restored to a 240 GB SanDisk SSD and used the original 2 TB Hard drive as storage drive D and mapped the documents and pictures etc. folders to the storage drive. The machine came with Win 8.1, which I downgraded to Win 7 using a stand alone Windows 7 Home Premium disk because my elderly mother did not want to move from Windows 7 which she was used to. I also installed Acronis 2014 and set the computer to back up to an external USB drive periodically. That was February of 2017. About a month ago Mom said she was working on the computer and walked away from it and a little while later she came back and it was just a black screen. Rebooting the machine gives the message, No boot device available, press F1 key to retry boot, F2 to run the setup utility
SATA 0: Installed
SATA 1: Installed
SATA 2: Installed
SATA 3: None
MSATA 1: None

I tried googling and it seems a common problem with Dell and the XPS 8500. Several tips to try changing boot type, unseat video card and reseat, reseat RAM, etc. I run the setup utility diagnostics which report everything is ok, but same thing, No Boot Device Available. So I bought a new Crucial 500 GB SSD and restored the C drive from the Acronis backup, I reboot and get same error message.
So I cleared the CMOS still no joy. Tried doing some more research on "No Boot Device available" error. Found this at AOMEI disk-partition.com regarding this error:
-Boot from disk that doesn’t contain operating system. -MBR or boot sector on the bootable disk is corrupted.
-The bootable disk is physically damaged or -Your computer is infected with virus. They recommended several fix trys: Fix 1. Check boot order and reset BIOS settings to default (I tried this a hundred times so far already it seems no joy); Fix 2. Perform a hard reset (I did the CMOS clear suggested earlier and did this, no joy); Fix 3. Run Startup Repair with Windows installation disc (I tried this and received the message that windows could not repair automatically. Wondering now if I tried this on the image I created from Acronis TI 2014, thinking I didn't); Fix 4. Run Bootrec commands with Windows installation disc (I did this from the Comand prompt using Win 7 DVD, 1st bootrec /fixmbr, said operation successful 2nd bootrec /fixboot, says "element not found", I continue with bootrec /scanos and bootrec /rebuildbcd do a reboot and again get same error. So I go to Fix 5. Fix damaged MBR without Windows installation disc, which is a free download of their program from AOMEI Partition with instructions to make a bootable USB drive, which I do. Next instruction is to boot from the usb drive and right click the system hard drive and choose “Rebuild MBR". So when I start the computer with the original SSD and the usb boots it up , the program shows my hard drive as disk 1 and shows it as 223.57GB with 223.57GB of free space!! At the bottom it shows 223.57GB Unallocated!!! So curiosity gets the best of me so I swap out hard drives and put the restored image SSD drive that I made from the Acronis backup onto a brand new SSD and run the same program on it. It looks totally different. If I'm reading it right it looks like the drive has 3 partitions? With the main one having 465GB. Something tells me that the original SSD got wiped somehow? Sound likely? Ok then why does the new SSD give the same No boot device available error? I'm stumped. Do I possibly have a hardware issue going here, fried MOBO, etc.?

 

[Lutfij]

If the system had an improper shutdown or a minor corruption of the OS, then it's likely yes that the drive got incapacitated. I had a similar issue which after hours and hours and even months of troubleshooting came down to the PSU failing to deliver power to all components in the system. Client didn't even mention that there were power surges where the lights would flicker like mad, even while the system was powered up, without a surge protector.

Also, there are instances of a corrupt installer which might contribute to the issue. Also, might want to see if your prebuilt has BIOS updates pending.

 

[David_jr]

Thanks for providing feedback. How can I update the bios if I can't get the OS to run? Also if the original SSD is corrupted, why will the new SSD with a restored image using acronis also give the same error No Boot Device Available?

 

[David_jr]

I finally decided just to do a fresh install with the original Windows 7 DVD on the SSD that somehow got wiped. This worked flawlessly and the computer was up and running without any problems. I also found one of the RAM sticks was no good so I order two new 4 GB sticks and now have 16GB. After getting all of the windows updates for 7, I upgraded the OS to WIN 10 for free by downloading an install ISO from Microsoft and burning it to a DVD. That worked easily as well. After I got it all back, Acronis reloaded and a backup and backup scheme set, I cloned the 240 SSD onto the 500 GB Crucial SSD that I purchased at the beginning of this problem. Now I have the 240 SSD sitting in the closet in case something happens. Thanks for all of the help it is much appreciated.