"Hard Disk - (3F0) BootDevice not found" after removing Windows

[prvak2]

Hi.

I own a ProBook 4530s that came with preinstalled Windows 7 Home Premium. I'm a long-time Linux user, so the first step I took after buying it was shrinking the OS partition and installing Arch Linux on the newly created free space. I have used the notebook in this setup for something like a year now, but since I rarely even boot to Windows, I decided to gain some free space by deleting them entirely. Using cfdisk, I deleted their partitions.

After a short time (about a day), I had the machine powered down, and I found some old labelless CD I wanted to inspect. I started the computed and inserted it into the drive. It was apparent it was a Windows XP installation CD, so I turned the computer off (before it finished the phase of loading drivers).

(It's likely that the previous paragraph is unrelated to the error message, because the installation shouldn't even touch the disk at that phase. I also don't reboot often, so I'm not sure whether did the computer boot between deleting the partition and booting the Windows XP CD.)

The next time I tried to boot the PC, I was greeted with "Hard Disk - (3F0) BootDevice not found". All HP diagnostics were OK, and when I instructed the GRUB on an Ubuntu live CD to boot into my hard drive, it booted normally.

I admit the BIOS might be somehow confused by the partition table I have, as it begins with a lot of free space and has no NTFS partitions, but I believe BIOSes shouldn't be dependent on the OS I run. So, I have a few questions:

1. Does the HP BIOS try to detect Windows, and does it do anything differently if it doesn't find Windows on the hard drive? I googled around, and didn't find anyone with experiences running just Linux on my notebook (just dual-booting...).
2. If it does, is there some way I could convince it to boot into the hard drive even through it doesn't have Windows on it?

Thanks.

[jiwen]

I see the same error but my situation still allows me to boot up but only with the secondary HDD in the DVD writer bay. For more details, please see an existing thread on http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware/Hard-Disk-3F0/m-p/1670523#M76013.

I am suspecting that it has something to do with BIOS not reading the MBR or something.

Have you sorted your issue on this yet?

Cheers

[prvak2]

Hi, thanks for your reply, but unfortunately, I haven't managed to sort the issue out yet - I'm still booting from a Ubuntu live DVD... I found the thread you linked to when I looked around for similar issues, but I thought it would be too much of a coincidence for some component of my notebook to fail at the exact time I deleted Windows. By the way, the MBR of the disk wasn't touched in the process, and restoring GRUB MBR crossed my mind, but didn't help...

[prvak2 · Accepted solution]

So it turns the notebook was confused because no partition was marked as active. My bad.