Chuck3

Problem solved! BIOS boot sequence needed to be tweaked

UPDATE!! The problem is definitely boot related! "fixntldr" and "Ultimate Boot CD for Windows" both allow me to get past the error and goes to the OS but the issue remains whenever I try to restart without a boot CD. I tried playing around with the boot.ini file and making sure the OS hdd is set to "Active" and is a Primary partition but no luck. Solutions are still needed. Thanks.

Thanks for the reply. I had that problem initially and then I found out about installing from a floppy during the WinXP install with F6 but the problem was that I have no floppy drive . So I slipstreamed the drivers into the install CD using nLite and all was well. After the install was complete everything was fine until I rebooted after performing numerous installs, then I would get the "no device" error. I don't think its a hardware issue since the drives do actually work with no tested errors. This one has me going insane!

(bump) Also, there is an onboard Intel RAID controller that I am not using either. I deactivated "forced RAID" through the BIOS as well.

I feel ashamed to have to ask this question but anyway... Just got a Dell Dimension 9200 (XPS 410) that came with two SATA II HDDs (160GB & 320GB). The factory install was Vista Home Basic but the previous owner upgraded to Vista Home Premium and that's how I received it. I wiped the drive to do a clean install on XP Pro w/ SP2. Once the install was complete all was fine until you restart. Upon restarted I got the dreaded "No boot device available" error. Having this issue in the past I had a CD with "fixntldr" on it which worked like a charm. I used it for this current issue and it booted right up no prob. I copied the boot.ini / ntldr / ntdetect.com files to the C: as recommended and restarted to test it. No luck, I still got the boot error. After repeated trys at the fixntldr fix followed by multiple OS reinstalls, I decided to do a clean install of Vista Ultimate thinking that maybe my new machine just didn't like my copy of XP Pro w/ SP2. After Vista was completely installed, I installed the updates and other typical crap and rebooted and VOILA the boot error strikes again! I checked all my cables, ran diagnostics on my drives and checked my bios and this one has me boggled . I'm sure it's an easy fix that I'm overlooking. Thanks in advance for the help! Specs: Dell Dimension 9200 (XPS 410) Intel Quad 2 Core Q6600 (2.4Ghz, 1066FSB, 8mb L2) 4GB DDR2 667Mhz (3GB recognized of course) Seagate 160GB SATA II 7200RPM (ST3160815AS) Maxtor 320GB SATA II 7200RPM (STM3320620AS) 256MB Nvidia Geforce 7600GT PCIe x16 Creative Audigy SE 16x DVD 20x DVD+/-RW DL (lightscribe)