“Please insert boot media … ” Uh-oh!

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LANGALIST By Fred Langa It’s never good when your PC can’t find its startup files — or even its own hard drive! But there’s almost always a way to get
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lmacri, fisher75, woody, doriel

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In the last 2 years, I’ve had this message on a Sony laptop still running Vista, a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 Home (twice), and a Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 running Windows 10 Pro. In each case, full recovery only required these steps: Stifle reflexive panic. Use on/off button or other method to shut down the computer. Wait a minute. Reboot.

Thanks for the reminder and the step-b-step for WinRE. Is there a reason to not try the above first?

Michael163

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I get this message occasionally on my 8 yr old ASUS laptop running Win10Pro.  I notice it happens more when the laptop has not been powered up for several days.  Not sure why it happens, if I had a spinning hard drive instead of an SSD I would suspect a slow power up issue.  Anyway it never reoccurrs once I hit the power off and then power back up.  Mainly an annoyance issue and since it is no longer my main laptop I have not spent any time to troubleshoot it.

 

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I’ve got this problem occasionally, with an added complication.  When I upgraded my motherboard several years ago, in order to be able to set up a RAID 5 volume I had to put up with my primary boot drive also being RAID; it was all or nothing.  Motherboard is Gigabyte GA-Z270X-UD3.  So I created a boot volume with 2 identical 500G drives in RAID 2.  And therein lies the problem.

Every now & then I run into that “Insert Boot Media” error.  Problem is, when that happens, I can’t access the repair environment because it doesn’t seem to be loading the RAID driver to make the RAID C: partition available.  Even worse, the documentation on the motherboard CD/DVD leaves quite a bit to be desired, and I can’t even definitively identify the RAID driver file!  (it was pretty much dumb luck when I found it during the original build, and I neglected to write it down – I was just happy to get past the point of needing it!).

And to add insult to injury, when the machine is trying to access the recovery environment, and suggests I insert a disk or whatever with the necessary file, the only drive options I’m presented with are some weird drive letter like X: or Z: that doesn’t seem to correspnd to any physical drive on the entire system.

Any suggestions?

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For Windows to “see” your disk it needs the driver for the disk controller – this is not the case in non-RAID mode.

The motherboard controller should provide basic access to the RAID array to allow Windows to boot and then find the disk driver. It sounds like this is not happening and that usually means a mobo issue.

Have you checked that the array is healthy – no failed disks?
Do you have a bootable recovery disk/USB created from that machine?
What version of Windows?
Can you add a plug-in controller to provide the RAID and then have one disk for your OS?

cheers, Paul

p.s. I’ll look into creating a new topic for you so we don’t muddy the blog post

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I’ve had it happen several times on a Dell Optiplex 7010 desktop (purchased 10/2013, i7-3770, BIOS A29) I use for my security cams. Turns out the fix was simple; why it happens I don’t know.

In my case, for whatever reason, the BIOS would change from UEFI to Legacy. Since the computer was setup and the OS (Win 10 Pro) installed in UEFI mode, when the BIOS switched to Legacy, the computer would not boot. Changing the BIOS from Legacy to UEFI fixed the issue. Simple fix; not so simple to diagnose.

HTH,
Kevin

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