[Rileys Dad]

I have a dell XPS desktop machine running windows vista. This morning I went to start it from sleep mode, and it wouldn't start. I did a hard reboot, and get a black screen with a message that there is No boot device available. There is no option to run any diagnostic or repair utilities. I am guessing at this point that the hard drive is completely fried and my only option will be to replace it?

[Advertisements]

Hello, this is not necessarily true, it could be that the boot sector has become corrupted and needs a repair.

Do you know what make/model the hard drive is inside?

[Troy]

Hello, this is not necessarily true, it could be that the boot sector has become corrupted and needs a repair.

Do you know what make/model the hard drive is inside?

[Rileys Dad]

According to Dell, looking up the service tag, it is:

HARD DRIVE..., 250G, S2, 7.2K, 3.5, WD-HAWK

[Troy]

WD-HAWK seems to be a Western Digital hard drive. Download the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for DOS (CD), burn to disc and run a diagnostic:

http://support.wdc.c...&sid=30&lang=en

When you burn it to disc it will be a bootable disc, so put the disc into the drive and boot up the computer, it should start off the CD and then load the diagnostic.

Let me know how you go with it.

[Rileys Dad]

I burned an image of the recommended file, booted my computer, and got the message:

"No Drive Found, Error/Status Code 0120"

[Troy]

Are you familiar with the BIOS at all?

[Rileys Dad]

Yes, I am familiar with the BIOS. The harddrive is listed in the slot SATA-0, and the BIOS shows it as ON, and shows the drive details.

I just went and in reset the factory defaults....and the machine booted just fine.

What in the world would have caused that?

[Troy]

Wow that's great! I couldn't tell you from here what caused it but perhaps try and avoid putting the computer to sleep?! Also, time to make sure you have a backup of important data.

One other thing that comes to mind, check out the Dell Support website and see if there is a BIOS update for this machine, it may resolve this issue happening again.