Replaced hard drive, Ran recovery disks. No bootable device found

[rdudley]

Hard drive failure. Bought a new hard drive, install went fine. Ran my recovery disks. Removed disk #3 and clicked continue as directed. Computer restarted and gave the No Bootable Device error. Restarted again, same thing.

I have checked the boot manager. Shows the drive. Ran diagnostics, drive passed quick test and extended test. Checked BIOS, drive is not listed as bootable device.

I put recovery disk #1 back in, ran the whole thing again, same problem.

So, now what?

[Huffer]

These are homemade recovery disks from the HP backup and recovery manager? Every now and then they don't burn quite right. 

[rdudley]

Disks I made when I bought the machine.

[Huffer]

Did you by any chance ever have Windows 10 installed and activated on it? Once that is done once you can always reinstall Windows 10 from the Media Creation Tool site. HP no longer has any Windows 7 restore disks in stock and OEM Windows 7 is tough to find as a free download but you can find OEM Windows 7 disks for sale for maybe $30-40. 

[rdudley]

No, no Windows 10.  These recovery disks are perfect. I've never used them until today. Why would the machine not make useful disks? GRRRR! 

Is there anything else I can do to force it? The diagnostic tools have all found it, so noting is loose or installed improperly. Hardware checks are all fine.

Will any Windows 7 work? My desk top has it. Can I just make another set of recovery disks from it?

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

It has to be OEM Windows 7 and the same level like Home Premium. 

Unless your desktop came with a Microsoft OEM Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit disk, no it is not going to make you a useable recovery disk. 

You can try nuking the hard drive with something like dban and come back and try the recovery disks again. 

The HP homemade disks are not recovering the boot sector of the hard drive correctly. Perhaps you can go in with a Windows 7 repair disk and run a diskpart command and be sure the recovery is setting the boot partition as active or run a "fixboot" or "fixmbr" command. 

I suspect all the files are on the drive it is just a matter of properly rendering it bootable. 

Might even try something like this:

https://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair-cd/home/Home/

[rdudley]

Ok. I'll download the boot repair and see what happens.

I've also seen where other people were directed to purchase Recovery Disk Kits from www.computersurgeons. If the boot repair doesn't work, will a disk kit work?

[rdudley]

Sorry, one more question. Would now be a good time to try Linux?

[rdudley]

Boot Repair disk did the trick! Software & drivers loading now. Thanks for your help!

[Huffer]

Now is always a good time to try Linux. You might want to make a Live disk and run it and see what you think. But glad you got Windows loading. Not this old guy's first rodeo although that was a bit of a Hail Mary. Enjoy!