Dell inspiron 531 with vista home premium, sata DVD/hdd, wont boot past bios screen, blinking cursor in top left corner. with nothing hooked up, says no boot devices available. i have tried each one solo, made sure floppy was disabled, cdrom set to boot first. also tried with raid controller on and off... nothing, even tried all 4 SATA controllers.. i have no clue wtf is wrong with this thing, anyone seen this before?? Power light is blue, everything spins up, just hangs on boot, wont even boot off a genuine vista dvd with no hdd hooked up. LOL. Someone school me please :) THANKS!

Test all power and data leads that attach to your hard drive IDE,SATA
the leads from your MOTHERBOARD TO THE HARD DRIVE make sure they have a secure dust free connections and are not faulty or just replace them they could be faulty if its a flat 40pin ide this will be the first to fail Make sure all leads that are attached to your drives dvd\cd and floppy (If Applicable) have secure connections and are not faulty.
Restart your computer During the boot process you will see on the screen to press a certain key to enter setup usually the Delete or the F2 key but will differ depending on your computer and Bios. Press and hold that key during the boot up process to enter BIOS then using the arrow keys navigate to advanced bios features press enter change your first boot device to cd press escape then press f10 to save to cmos restart this will erase you operating system you will have to have an operating system disk to load it onto you hard drive or create a partition to load another operating system. Note: After you have loaded the operating system you should go back and change the first boot device to failsafe or optimised defaults after windows has loaded If you are putting windows XP on your computer your computer will automatically restart it might restart 2 times one to finish the installation the next will be because the operating system is loaded and will boot from your cd\dvd. Hope this helps.

If yo are sure that you have a working operating system on your hard disk , and this error started after you (probably) defaulted the Bios settings or something else did ....Than I think the lack of sata raid driver makes the reading of your hard disk impossible ..To fix this ..either try to reinstall the operation system and during it ..choose to add a 3rd party driver (look for raid driver on your motherboard cd ..or on the manufacturer's support site ) ..or ..just get into Bios again ..look for the HDD in the advanced options ..and select the hdd 0 ..and eliminate the achi feature ..and replace it with sata as ide ..or compatible ..and save settings with F10 and restart ..It will make the hdd visible ..and support installation if it has non ...or just boot up ..but will work as IDE and not raid ..

Here is a link to a list of beeping codes from dell. Also there is a list for the lights on the back of the system.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dsleest/codemess.htm

I would suspect a bad hard drive.

Try in Safe Mode.
Press F8 as you boot up, when the menu comes up select Safe mode.
Windows will the boot up in standard VGA mode.

You need to go into the Setup Utility or BIOS when the computer boots. You need to enable the computer to boot from the CD drive, and set up boot priority with CD Drive first, then Hard Drive HDD.

Then it will boot the disc.

hello, sounds like memory issue, I would say if you have more than one stick of memory in it remove one at a time and try it again.
also while you are at it reset BIOS by remove battery from motherboard and/or switching jumper setting.

hope it helps.

regards
Amar Sondhi

Go into the bios of your Dell and ensure that the Sata HDD 0 is being seen by the bios and that it has not been switched with the DVD. Make sure that the sata cables on the main board are plugged in correctly the hard drive should be in sata port 0 and on some dells it's sata port 1. Make sure in the bios that the Sata HDD 0 is enabled.

Hope this helps.

Boot Loop run restore disk see if that helps

Check the BIOS configuration to see if all the SATA channels are enabled.