Boot media not found

[typographie]

A long-distance friend of mine randomly started getting an error message last night when booting her PC. After POST and before loading Windows, it says something to the effect of "No bootable device detected."

 

What we tried that didn't work:

• Checking all SATA connections
• Trying a different SATA cable
• Trying a different SATA port
• Trying a different drive
• Disconnecting all other SATA devices but the SSD
• Checking the boot priority list in the BIOS, setting her boot SSD to the top priority
• Loading default BIOS settings
• Clearing the CMOS
• Reformatting/reinstalling from the Windows disk—the reformat apparently worked, but it won't allow her to select a partition to set up Windows

Does anyone have any ideas what else to try? At the moment I'm not even completely sure what component to try to RMA (though I think the motherboard is deeply suspicious).

 

If it matters, she recently moved and had her PC shipped to her. She removed the video card and CPU cooler for shipping, but I'm pretty sure all SATA devices were connected. Naturally it's possible something was damaged in shipping, although I think the PC worked fine for a few days after arrival.

 

Her system specs:
Core i5-4690K at stock

2x8 GB of DDR3

512 GB Samsung 850 EVO

1 TB HDD, don't know what model

Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK

EVGA GTX 970

Seasonic X650

[mluton]

Disk might have failed, can you pop the HDD in another PC to check ?