Inaccessible boot device error?

[Sausage in Section 17]

I have an old, refurbished Dell desktop, which runs on Windows 10. I keep getting this error message whenever I try to turn it on.

Is this likely the beginning of the end? Is it worthwhile to have someone try to resolve this? Is this likely just a software issue, or potentially something else?

All help is appreciated, TIA.

 

[ColdSoxPack]

What s the error message?

 

[Sausage in Section 17]

Like the thread title says...inaccessible boot device error

 

[Max Power]

Your drive may have failed, but I've seen this error when the disk mode switched from AHCI to RAID or vice versa after a firmware update. You can boot into the system settings by hitting F2 at startup, scroll down to the SATA operation mode or whatever it's called and see if switching that fixes it. You can also look in the system summary of those same settings to see if a drive is listed. If you don't see anything under M.2 or SSD, the drive has totally failed and you'd have to replace it and reinstall everything.

 

[ColdSoxPack]

Good call on read the title. If I needed a new drive I would not reinstall Windows 10. I don't know if your older computer can support Windows 11.

 

[AlNipper49]

the good news is that he should boot into the bios (usually f2,f10 or del) to see what it is saying about the hard drive. At the same time it would be easy to see if TPM is there (w11 required)

 

[tonyandpals]

Make sure there isn't a USB drive in there that's trying it's trying to boot to because it's first in the order (yes I did this once).

 

[Sausage in Section 17]

Your drive may have failed, but I've seen this error when the disk mode switched from AHCI to RAID or vice versa after a firmware update. You can boot into the system settings by hitting F2 at startup, scroll down to the SATA operation mode or whatever it's called and see if switching that fixes it. You can also look in the system summary of those same settings to see if a drive is listed. If you don't see anything under M.2 or SSD, the drive has totally failed and you'd have to replace it and reinstall everything.

Dude!

This totally worked, and isn't something I would have found without your help.

Now, however, I cannot find or connect to my router, which I think is a failure of my USB wireless device.

Kudos to SoSH IT support specialist, Max Power!