I'm running Win7 (upgraded from Vista) on a Dell PC that is a little over 5 years old. Last night I fell asleep while it was on and when I woke up, it looked like it had shut down and then tried to start back up. However it displayed a "no boot device available" message. It was also making a kind of tic tic tic sound which I'm guessing was the hard drive. Fearing the worst, I turned it off and then back on but it booted up normally and seemed to be ok.
Today when I booted up, it went into chkdsk instead, with a message that one of my disks needed to be checked for consistency. The check found an index error, 76 orphaned files, cleaned up a bunch of unused index entries and corrected errors in the Volume Bitmap. Since then everything seems to be fine and I've been able to boot up a couple of times without a problem.
Since I was asleep at the time, I really don't know what happened. I can understand something causing the PC to shut down, but what would cause it to say that no boot device was available? Is it possible it just crashed and displayed the message without even trying to restart, and could this be an indication that my hard drive is on its last leg? I haven't had any issues up until now.
Today when I booted up, it went into chkdsk instead, with a message that one of my disks needed to be checked for consistency. The check found an index error, 76 orphaned files, cleaned up a bunch of unused index entries and corrected errors in the Volume Bitmap. Since then everything seems to be fine and I've been able to boot up a couple of times without a problem.
Since I was asleep at the time, I really don't know what happened. I can understand something causing the PC to shut down, but what would cause it to say that no boot device was available? Is it possible it just crashed and displayed the message without even trying to restart, and could this be an indication that my hard drive is on its last leg? I haven't had any issues up until now.