I have an old laptop that I’m having issues booting up, I’m getting the “Boot Device Not Found” message when starting up (Occasionally it will all work though).

IMO it’s a solid spec still (Dell Precision M3800) and should be more than enough for what I need a laptop to do so I’m keen to get it working. It’s got 2 hard drives: a 500GB mSATA SSD and a 500 GB hybrid drive, I didn’t build the machine but I assume the SSD is what it is booting from.

I’m thinking this is the best course of diagnostics:
– Open-up and check drive connections/cables
– Make a boot drive on a flash drive and see if I can boot from that – if I can boot from that is it worth setting the hybrid drive up as a boot drive to check all the rest of the hardware is working ok?
– Assuming above works, buy new mSATA SSD and rebuild machine

Does anyone have any other suggestions? (e.g. “you’ve overlooked this simple fix” or “don’t bother it’ll be borked” or “that looks about right”)

Thanks!

Difficult to diagnose without being in front of it. How old is “old”?

If you go into BIOS / UEFI, can you see both drives detected? If not then checking connections is a good idea in case it’s been dropped or something.

Setting the hybrid drive as a boot drive is highly unlikely to work as there almost certainly won’t be an operating system installed on it unless it’s a Frankenlaptop that someone else owned previously.

Is there any data on it that you’re concerned about keeping?

… where are you geographically?

Looks like it’s this, so should be a servicable machine.:
https://www.techradar.com/uk/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pcs/laptops-and-netbooks/dell-precision-m3800-1227026/review

One thing to try, It could just be that windows is horribly corrupt, it might be worth boot up windows from USB stick, but rather then reinstalling, run the various checks/repair options

If you download a bootable copy of windows to a USB stick, and boot from USB you can run the following commands:

bootrec.exe/fixmbr to repair damaged MBR
bootrec.exe/fixboot to write new boot sector
bootrec.exe/rebuildbcd to rebuild boot configuration data
bootrec.exe/scanos to scan the operating system and adding any missing windows configuration

There was also a “thing” a while back where a Windows/Dell update buggered up the uefi boot somehow on some dell laptops. It happened to my parents one – I had to go into the bios and turn some kind of secureboot off iirc, then it came to life at worked fine.

Thanks all,

Cougar, yeah it’s a 2015 machine, it seems to still be a much better spec than the desktop I bought in 2020 that serves all my needs fine! I’m in Aberdeenshire. Ok yeah, I’d imagine the OS is on the SSD, I’d miss understood, I thought that’s what the boot disk got round.

mattyfez and sobriety, I’ll give those suggestions a go.

If you do have it open for surgery, consider replacing the button cell, BIOS battery.
I’ve had a dell desktop throw boot oddness due the battery failing.

If you do have it open for surgery, consider replacing the button cell, BIOS battery.
I’ve had a dell desktop throw boot oddness due the battery failing.

Good point, opening up laptops is a pain in teh bum, so for the sake of 99p may as well whack a new BIOS battery in whilst you are at it.

Related note, you’ll probably be able to find a youtube video or tech document for the laptop explaining how to open it up, it’s well worth knowing beforehand the correct process, saves a lot of swearing and potentialy damaging it..

ICYMI

Is there any data on it that you’re concerned about keeping?

I thought that’s what the boot disk got round.

Simplifying (not least because modern UEFI is a lot more complicated than this):

The BIOS starts the PC and then hands over control to the boot device. This contains a chunk of code which starts the OS (eg, Windows). 99.9% of the time these are both on the same disk but they don’t have to be.

If the problem is as matty is assuming that the boot device records are up the pole but the rest of the drive is fine then technically it may be possible with BCD-hacking shenanigans to create a new boot record on the hybrid drive and point it back to the Windows install on the SSD. However, in practice there’s very little reason to do this, you’d try and repair the existing damaged boot record (again, as MF is proposing).

If you were to conclude “OK, the SSD is buggered” and wanted to turn the hybrid drive into the new boot drive you’ve got the problem that there’s no OS to point to. So you’d have to install Windows, at which point there’s zero point in cocking about with boot records as the installer will do it for you.

All of which is why I asked in the first place whether the drives were showing as detected in BIOS or not. Does that make sense?

Oh, or did you mean “boot device” as in a pendrive? That will let you attempt a repair / reinstall but I doubt it’s going to trivially allow you to boot into the existing install.

Is there any data on it that you’re concerned about keeping?

No I don’t think so, everything was run off onedrive

Oh, or did you mean “boot device” as in a pendrive?

Yeah, I was thinking something along the lines of this

I pressed F12 at the boot menu and had a poke around. One option was to run diagnostics which launches “Dell ePSA – Pre-boot System Assessment”. This seems to test all the hardware and suggests that everything is fine, it sees the SSD and identifies this as the boot path

There was also a “thing” a while back where a Windows/Dell update buggered up the uefi boot somehow on some dell laptops. It happened to my parents one – I had to go into the bios and turn some kind of secureboot off iirc, then it came to life at worked fine.

I’ve just checked and secure boot is off

I’ve opened it up (it’s all fairly straightforward, all the vids seem to be <3mins long and spend the first 2.5 mins telling you how to get the bottom of the case off…) I popped the mSATA in and out, it didn’t seem loose.

AND JUST NOW as I’m compiling all this it’s booted?!?! It seems to do this time to time – infuriating! Any idea of tests I can do while it is open? should I run all of mattyfez’s bootrec executables?

To add a bit of context for you all, it’s my wife’s old work machine, they have a policy of gifting them to staff once they get to a certain age. Hence I don’t know much about the build.

should I run all of mattyfez’s bootrec executables?

Hell no! Not if it’s actually booted.

From a ‘run as administrator’ elevated command prompt:

sfc /scannow

If it comes back with no errors, then chkdsk /f (this will require a reboot). If it doesn’t, stop and report back what it says instead.

Just did a swift google, and I think it might have been “legacy boot” that I enabled – but if your boot is intermittent then I’d wager it’s not that, as that bricked the machine until I switched it over.

I’m just running sfc/scannow

I occured to me this morning that the times I’ve run the pre-boot system assessment it has then gone on to boot up normally (or that’s my working hypothesis until proven otherwise!). Not sure what that says in terms of diagnosis…

From a ‘run as administrator’ elevated command prompt:

sfc /scannow

If it comes back with no errors, then chkdsk /f (this will require a reboot). If it doesn’t, stop and report back what it says instead.

This is what I get:
“Windows Resource protection found corrupt files and successfully repaired them.
For online repairs, details are included in the CBS log file located at windir\logs\CBS\CBS.log. For example C:\Windows\logs\CBS\CBS.log. For offline repairs, details are included in the log file provided by the /OFFLOGFILE file.”

I’ve taken a look at the CBS.log file and it’s 8000+ lines of stuff I don’t understand!

One thing to try, It could just be that windows is horribly corrupt, it might be worth boot up windows from USB stick, but rather then reinstalling, run the various checks/repair options

How could corruption to Windows give an intermittent “Boot Device Not Found” message?
That message is the BIOS(/UFI equiv.) being unable to hand over to the bootloader.

Either the bootloader is there or it’s not. If it’s sometimes not, then I can only think it’s an intermittent hardware fault in the SSD/motherboard/physical motherboard port.

My thoughts also. But it can’t hurt to check the basics whilst we have the opportunity, the fewer variables to worry about the better.

Mat, run the chdsk now please, as above. You can zip and email the log file to me for a once-over if you like, though I doubt there will be much of use in it.

I’ve run chkdsk/f

The type of the file system is NTFS.
Cannot lock current drive.

Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be checcked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N)

I hit Y then called a reboot, its just spent 5 mins scanning and repairing drive.

Edit: ok a little more than 5 mins, its been stuck on 100% complete for the last 10 mins!

Leave it a good while, hopefully it will sort itself out, or maybe repeat the process, but sometimes tools like this dont really give a very good indication of how they are progressing, so best to just wait a good while.

Clearly there was some sort of corruption/missing files so even if not causing your issue directly is good to fix anyway.

Update with (sort of) positive news, I tried the “chkdsk /f” a few more times and could never get it to complete, even waiting hours (it would just hang on 100% complete). The laptop seemed pretty unstable and when I did manage to get into windows it would crash.

I decided sod it, a new SSD was £40 (256GB not the 500GB previously quoted). I was just going to take a punt and see if that fixes the issue. It arrived yesterday and this evening I’ve popped it in the laptop, in the meantime a prepared a windows 10 installation on a usb drive. I switched it on with the machine attached and it has booted up normally (as in actually working properly) without asking me to boot from the USB drive. Everything has loaded up as normal. I’m really doubting my understanding of the setup now…

Does this mean the machine hasn’t been booting from the SSD?
If it has been booting from the HD why has this resolved the boot issue?
Should I see two separate drives (my computer just shows 1 C-drive, before and after I replaced the SSD)

The SSD and HD both show up in the listed hardware in the bios and in device manager

You won’t see two drives in “my computer” as the new drive isn’t formatted. You should see two drives in Disk Manager.

I would assume that if you disconnect the new SSD it’ll still boot?