Out of the blue My Dell Optiplex 110 doesn’t detect the Hard Drive after a full shut-down. I wanted to reboot into Linux but rebooted Windows instead. No problems, it rebooted normally. Back at the Windows login I chose shut-down (to save time). It powered off and I depressed power-on. After an unusually long delay… “Diskette drive 0 failure” and another while later “No boot device available”. Pressing F2 brings up the BIOS Setup Utility. For both hard disks and the CDRW it reports “unknown device”.
The GX110 has been running at least 2 weeks since it was last turned on. No recent hardware or software changes. It boots with a bootable diskette and a DIR x:\ displays the Windows root directory and all other FAT partitions on disk-0 and disk-1.
On two occasions, after booting from a diskette, ejecting the diskette and depressing Alt-Ctrl-Del, the GX110 rebooted as it should. But I can’t repeat or reproduce it. The SC diagnostics report valid and clean MBR, partition tables and boot sectors.
The BIOS is current (A09). Any information you can provide is greatly appreciated. Thanks.