XC-600 hard drive not found by BIOS

My XC-600 throws "No boot disk has been detected or the disk has failed" error in startup. In BIOS Boot options, under "Hard Disk Drive priority" I cannot find any drives. I have win 10 installation USB which I can use for booting and, e.g., to access command prompt. From cmd, I can still access my (two) hard drives and their contents (I tested running some cmd programs etc).

I recently added an SSD HD and did a clean win 10 installation on the drive. Everything ran well for a couple of days. Then I fully erased the earlier 1TB drive (all mysterious partitions of it) to make it a pure file storage. I also did some random changes like removing the old OS version from msconfig (https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3gwaq6/two_volumes_on_startup_volume_6_and_volume_4_why/). I cannot point out exactly after which change I restarted the machine so that it failed (as described in the 1st paragraph), but something must have gone wrong and I doubt it would be the hardware. I have tried all combinations of hard drives and SATA ports and none of them work so that BIOS would recognize the drives or the system would boot. I also tested changing the secure boot setting in BIOS without any success.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Accepted answers

IronFly

Probably you deleted the EFI partition (if your BIOS is set to UEFI) or MBR partition (if your BIOS is set to Legacy/Launch CSM).

when you installed windows 10 on the SSD, it read the EFI partition on the 1TB HDD and now that partition is gone.

try to run startup repair under advanced options with the windows 10 installation media.

All comments

IronFly

Probably you deleted the EFI partition (if your BIOS is set to UEFI) or MBR partition (if your BIOS is set to Legacy/Launch CSM).

when you installed windows 10 on the SSD, it read the EFI partition on the 1TB HDD and now that partition is gone.

try to run startup repair under advanced options with the windows 10 installation media.

anselmi

Thanks! I will give this a shot later today. It's a reasonable guess for the root cause, because there were multiple small partitions in the old drive which I erased without really knowing what they do...

Is there any other way to restore the partitions, if the windows installation media won't work? (I tried at least re-installing / repairing the current windows installation, but somehow that failed, too. I am not sure if I explicitly tried "startup repair".)

IronFly

if media installation fix won't work...only a clean windows installation will fix it.

anselmi

Update: when trying to repair, diagnostics run and repair is attempted but eventually I get "Startup Repair couldn't repair your PC". If I try "Reset this PC", it fails with message "The drive where windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again." Finally, if I try "Install now" instead of repair from the boot usb stick, it also fails with "We couldn't create a partition or locate an existing one. See setup log files for more info." Cannot find the log file though...

So I guess there's nothing that can be done via command prompt which seems to run ok? I basically need to hook up the hdd to another computer and make a clean windows installation? Any idea what this "drive is locked" error refers to?

IronFly

ok, HDD locked probably means that its password is frozen on BIOS.

press Del to enter BIOS and follow this guide:

http://acer.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/32674/~/bios-password-frozen#_ga=1.262809484.1609204961.1438903912

Hint: i suggest you to disconnect the old HDD before windows installation, so it will recognise the SSD only.

anselmi

Actually the fresh installation worked after all, I just had to format the SSD drive first which "unlocked" the drive, too. )I was doing something else while my 2.5 years old daughter started playing around with keyboard and managed to select "format"...)