What do you do if your computer says no bootable devices found?

Question

Ok - I was sick of all the junk slowing down my PC so i decided to reformat it. Slapped in the disk, then waited for it to load. It then said it couldn't find any hard drives... . Now, i was getting worried. I restarted the PC and found a blue screen of death whenever i boot up. It says; Missing something: Boot_Volume. Now, as i have read on Yahoo Answers, another person had a similar problem where there hard drive wasn't detected. Except, we tried to fix my PC and put in my brothers Hard-Drive, to see if it was just my hard drive that was broken. It gave the same error >.> . Getting really annoyed now, if anyone could fix this, I would be eternally grateful. Not going to get a new hard drive etc., because it seems unnecessary.

Take care, Deamie

Answer 1

Firstly, reformatting is not a preferred solution to getting rid of junk. There are easier measures.

Your computer still has the BIOS or CMOS in it (the very basic operating system you can access by pressing either one of the following keys immediately upon starting the computer:

    * F1

    * F2

    * DEL

    * ESC

    * F10

If this fails, try holding the F10 or the Insert key after switching on.

After getting into the BIOS you need to set the cd/dvd drive as the first boot option. This will allow the disk to be read during boot as the bootable device. And you can install.

If this fails, I'll have to have a think.

Edit - I see. In that case, as the first answer indicated, you need to make the HDD bootable.

Answer 2

When you format a hard drive you have to also make it bootable.  The easiest way to get this done is to re-install Windows.  You should be able to place the Windows CD into your computer, then boot up.  

If you have the CD-ROM as a bootable device before the Hard Drive...It will go to a screen that state, Please prease any key to continue...or something like that.

Boot to the CD and install windows.  During the process it will reformat your hard drive again, then install Windows, in the process using the appropriate format swtiches to make it bootable.

Basically the syntac would be at a minimum --> c:\format c: /s

Answer 3

Could be a problem with device drivers, hardware or software. This  problem can be solved by uninstalling new software, updating device drivers and making minor configuration changes . From http://fixit.in/bluescreenofdeath.html . You can also run a free registry scan using utilities from http://re7.info