Unfortunately, every time I restart/turn on my computer, an error occurs that says "No Boot Device Available."
I have explored the BIOS, and I have tried putting the boot order with CD first and with SATA first. Neither option fixes the problem. I have switched the SATA cable, which only causes the BIOS to fail to find the hard drive. I have also run the recovery to replace the boot files to no avail.
I don't know what else to do... should I replace the SATA cable?
The only way for me to boot into XP is to set boot from CD and have a bootable CD in the drive at startup. Obviously this is something I want to avoid having to do.
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This did not happen all of a sudden. I bought a new SATA hard drive, put it in my machine, installed XP, and the problem has been occurring ever since the install. The BIOS does in fact detect the hard drive, and, oddly enough, if I start the boot menu when the computer is starting and select "SATA Hard Drive," it will boot up.
The hard drive has not failed because I am currently typing on the affected computer.
Seems like it is not picking up the SATA drive on bootup. But it will if you slow the boot process down.
See if there are options in the BIOS to slow the boot process up. These could be memory checking, making the floppy drive the first drive to check for booting from, etc.
See what happens if the boot process is slowed down giving the BIOS time to find the hard disk.
When you added the SATA drivers to the XPSP3 CD using nLite, did you add both the SATARAID (NVIDIA nForce Storage Controller / NVIDIA RAID Driver) **AND** the SATA_IDE (NVIDIA nForce Storage Controller) drivers? Both of them need to be added via nLite. If both weren't then that may be why you (1) needed to restart the system to complete the installation and (2) are now having problems getting the SATA HDD recognized during boot up.
[Not seeking pts here -- just trying to help you resolve this issue.]
CheVive- Yes, I added all of the drivers that were available for the system.
I have figured it out! It was really quite an easy fix. As it turns out, in my Boot Sequence Menu, my SATA drive didn't have a number next to it in terms of what order to boot in. While it was at the top of the list, it was not selected as a boot drive at all. I simply had to highlight the SATA drive and press space, which added it as a numbered item on the list.
I provided the answer to my own problem so that people may use this later in frustrating times of failed boots.
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by: PriceDPosted on 2009-08-15 at 21:58:55ID: 25107817
Did this just all of a sudden happen? In the BIOS is it detecting a Hard Drive? This error can occur for many reason, and a hard drive failure is one of them.