XPS 8500 Boot Issues

Scheer · June 15, 2014

My mother-in-law has a Dell XPS 8500 that wouldn't boot after a storm, the computer is plugged into a battery backup, and she says the battery backup was unplugged from the wall during the storm and the computer was off. They live in the boonies and power is an issue up there, so unplugging all the electronics is a routine for them when they know a storm is coming.

Anyways, it would load into the Windows diagnostic, and say that it could not be repaired, so I formatted it and did a fresh install...

Now it will sometimes boot into Windows, and other times it will give me a black screen that says no boot device available, strike F1 to retry boot... below that it says that both Sata0 and Sata1 are installed. All I have to do is hit F1 and it will boot into Windows fine, but as this happens about 50% of the time I'd like to figure out how to fix it.

With the original BIOS I have tried resetting to factory settings in the BIOS, moving the jumper on the motherboard to reset to factory settings, as well as try about 100 different boot options in the BIOS. I've tried legacy boot, safe boot on and off, different hard drives/OS plugged in, etc... and no matter what I try it will have the no boot device available almost every other boot. I then updated to the latest BIOS, still no luck.

Any other ideas? TIA.

aricleather · June 15, 2014

My mother-in-law has a Dell XPS 8500 that wouldn't boot after a storm, the computer is plugged into a battery backup, and she says the battery backup was unplugged from the wall during the storm and the computer was off. They live in the boonies and power is an issue up there, so unplugging all the electronics is a routine for them when they know a storm is coming.

Anyways, it would load into the Windows diagnostic, and say that it could not be repaired, so I formatted it and did a fresh install...

Now it will sometimes boot into Windows, and other times it will give me a black screen that says no boot device available, strike F1 to retry boot... below that it says that both Sata0 and Sata1 are installed. All I have to do is hit F1 and it will boot into Windows fine, but as this happens about 50% of the time I'd like to figure out how to fix it.

With the original BIOS I have tried resetting to factory settings in the BIOS, moving the jumper on the motherboard to reset to factory settings, as well as try about 100 different boot options in the BIOS. I've tried legacy boot, safe boot on and off, different hard drives/OS plugged in, etc... and no matter what I try it will have the no boot device available almost every other boot. I then updated to the latest BIOS, still no luck.

Any other ideas? TIA.

I basically had the same problem when I accidentally broke my SATA Cable... Make sure they are plugged in all the way. If the problem persists, you could try new SATA cables.