What lies behind the “no bootable device” error is a single question that will have two completely different answers. Can the computer still see the drive it needs to boot from? Within sixty seconds in the BIOS, you’ll know whether the path you take is safe, how much risk you’ll be taking, and if you’ll lose anything important.
Open the BIOS and look for the drive. If you find the drive listed within the BIOS, but it’s not recognised as something that boots... then there was a problem somewhere in the layer of software that controls what makes a disk bootable. Usually, these issues are relatively easy to recover from. If you don’t see it listed anywhere within the BIOS... Then either the drive itself has failed or there is some issue with the cable connecting it to the motherboard. In either case, the solution involves fixing the hardware.
As soon as you turn on your computer, the computer’s firmware comes alive, checks to see who is attached, and begins walking through a boot list looking for any devices that contain an operating system capable of starting. Each time it finds one of those candidates, it checks them for evidence they are capable of being started (usually called the ‘boot files’ or ‘signature’). On your screen right now is a message telling you that none of those devices were found. Note well, however, that this message did not say anything about your files, pictures, or other stuff contained on the drive. It simply told you that the firmware could not find an operational spark plug (the ignition) to make the car run; the rest of the car hasn’t been inspected at all.
Prior to making decisions based upon your situation, eliminate two common imposters. First disconnect every external USB stick and any external drives. Computers are happy to try to boot off an empty memory stick and then get frustrated when they can’t. Second, on desktops, gently nudge back into place any connectors that connect the drive (data cable and/or power cord). A loose connector will produce exactly this same error message.
As soon as you see a drive listed by name at its appropriate size you know the hardware was responding and the issue lies within the software. It could have been something like a non-standard boot order (put the internal drive first and try again; the solution will cost nothing and it is surprisingly common). Or, there could have been a power failure or a forceful shutdown which damaged your boot files or created damage deep enough into your partition map that the firmware cannot recognise a system on the disk. In all cases, the files remain right where they were. The safe way to proceed: If the data is important to you, protect it prior to working around it; there are many ways to safely access the contents of the drive such as through a bootable USB stick or on another machine or via a professional imaging process; our missing partition service rebuilds broken maps from a read-only copy of the drive. While repair first is often tempting and typically survives intact if done correctly on a good drive, it is a gamble with zero benefit if the documents are irreplaceable.
When a drive does not show up in the firmware’s own hardware listing (or shows up under some jumbled name, or lists itself as 0 GB), then the problem is not that it has lost its boot files; it simply isn’t answering as a device. Hard drives experience issues due to failing electronics/mechanics/firmware; while solid-state drives nearly always experience problems due to their controllers. There is no software capable of fixing a drive that the computer can’t even see. So, this branch has only one useful action: shut it down and let it stay that way. Every attempted restart further harms failing mechanisms or crashes already-damaged firmware. When we receive a drive in this state we restore it to a point where it can be imaged, but only for as long as that takes (essentially the content of our drive not recognised service), and extract the files from the resulting image.
Regardless of what branch you’re in, this is the warning that needs to be in bold: reinstalling Windows is not a recovery method. Instead, it creates a new operating system on the disk (thereby removing the error and burying the files) by essentially making a brand-new machine. Nobody should have to decide by accident whether they need their machine back or their data back when prompted during set up.
The error indicates that there was no working system found to start from, and as such has many possible causes (a dead drive being just one). There can be problems with settings, cabling issues, damage to the boot files or loss of the partition table that would all result in the same exact error. The BIOS split below will give you a good idea within about a minute whether your issue is related to the bad hardware or if it’s something else like the above-mentioned issues, which are the majority.
No, by design. The process over-writes some of the boot-related items but does leave your documents alone. In practice, two major concerns include repeated passes on a physical drive that is getting weak as each pass puts more wear-and-tear on the drive (and thus makes it weaker); secondly, a loop that continues to try to repair is indicative that the underlying issue may not simply be with boot files but possibly further down the line. One attempt is reasonable on a healthy-sounding drive, but a whole campaign of them isn’t.
Both ways, albeit in different manners. Most hard disks arrive at this point due to mechanical failure(s), or because of corruption occurring in the boot area of the hard drive. SSDs generally fail to show up in the list of available devices due to controller or firmware failures that effectively remove the entire device from the boot list. Regardless of how it arrived, the BIOS will read the same: listed-but-not-booting vs. not listed. Additionally, the non-listed SSD is virtually always a laboratory case where the data itself typically remains intact while the controller has failed.
Diagnostic performed at no charge within 48 hours, drives imaged prior to performing repairs, a written quote provided for any needed repairs prior to commencing said repairs, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.