No Boot Device Available

[Haole Boy]

Aloha! A customer dropped off a machine where they are getting the "No Boot Device Available" message. There are two identical hard drives in this machine, which makes me think it was set up for RAID 0 or 1 (both are possible per the setup manual).

BIOS does detect both disks (SATA0 and SATA1). In the BIOS setup, the SATA mode is set to RAID (the other choice is ATA). But when I look at the configuration of the Intel Matrix Storage Manager (CTRL+I during boot) it shows both drives as 'Non-RAID Disk'.

I think the problem is the conflict between BIOS and the IMSM. It's simple enough to try all the various setting combinations, but I'm worried that choosing the wrong combination will destroy the customer's system. So, can I just try the various setting combinations and see what happens? Or can I cause some damage by doing this?

Also, I usually use Drive Snapshot to backup the disk(s), but when I boot from a Win 7 PE disk, the drives show up as 'Not Initialized', so I can't use that tool. Any recommendations on another tool I can use?

This is a Dell Inspiron Desktop 540. The BIOS level is 1.0.1 and there is a BIOS update available. But I don't want to update the BIOS until I have a better handle on getting the machine to boot.

Mahalo,

Harry Z.

 

[PcTek9]

noooo way.

image both those drives before you go a step further.
changing the configuration can destroy all the data on them, if it has not been done already.

 

[Haole Boy]

PCTek9: thanks for the response. As I mentioned, my normal disk imaging tool does not work in this situation. Any recommendations on how to image these disks?

 

[PcTek9]

I would recommend trying dd in linux. This way you can do the bit by bit copy, unless there is some technical limitation i am unaware of.

 

[Boston Pro Comp Serv LLC]

I second that if you don't have a bench machine to image with Acronis or something like that boot from a Linux disc and dd them like tek suggests. That way you can work free without worry. If you never used dd before there's no progress monitor and its command line ( at least every time I've used it ) it can be slow and appear to be doing nothing just let it go until you get a message that it completed or failed.