You're not offering "tough love"... you're just being a punk! And you didn't read the original post... I stated, "it's NOT the drives". How do I know? I took drives out of another machine and ran them in the trouble machine. Same error message. Took the swapped drives back out of trouble machine and put back into working machine, and it booted right up.
Yea that's true. If I remember correctly that error message was intermittent for me and I was able to grab a good boot and enter BIOS
Lol, principles before popularity... so, think what you want. All my computers are up and running right now and trading. If something happens I can restore from backups and in many cases I can do it remotely if necessary. But, here you are grasping at straws and blaming the rest of the world for your problems. There's no shame in admitting you need to improve; esp. this aspect of your computing environment. Now, do yourself a favor and go back to the little list we made and use the good old "divide and conquer" method to pinpoint the problem.
You normally get that error when the BIOS does not understand the drives. You have said already that is not a problem with the drives so the option left is that your BIOS has lost its configuration. First I would do is to boot into a console, every OS has the option to boot into a console, it won't load the desktop. There you can trigger a check disk command in order to give you a report of your drives. Second, If you can enable verbose boot in your BIOS it will log a line on every single action is doing at start, there you might be able to see te error that is causing the issue. Another option is to prepare a bootable USB drive where you can load an independent OS, this way you will be able to update your BIOS if needed. Either way these errors are quite difficult to troubleshoot remotely, one has to be in front of the computer to see what is going on.
Attach a spare HD. Boot from your rescue disk / thumb drive. Install windows on the HD. If successful you will know it was software problem, if not it's hardware. If it is hardware repeat the above but attach your HD to a different controller port.
Run a complete hardware diagnostic test. https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/...t-diagnostics-supportassist-epsa-epsa-and-psa
Wrong drives dopey. Basically what you did is take the drives out of the computer and conclude they're ok because the machine still wouldn't boot. And you blocked me for joking around with you. Lol, you're an idiot.