[SOLVED] No bootable device?

[belladivediva]

I've had Ubuntu installed on my computer since 8.04. Resently, I upgraded from 9.10 to 10.04. During the upgrade (half way throught the clean up) my computer shut itself off. I turned it back on, and everything seemed okay. It booted up into 10.04, and it was working well for about a week now. I've turned it on and off since then, and everthing was going fine.

Today I turned it on and opened up firefox to check my email. As it was loading, firefox closed itself out, and then all of the icons on my toolbar and desktop turned into little white boxes, and when I clicked on them I got an error stating something about "child" and that there were no such directories. It wouldn't even let me shut the computer down properly..so I turned it off by holding down the button. I turned it back on, and it starts to turn on, but stops with an error message saying:

Intel UNDI, PXE-2.1 (build 082)
Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation

For Realtek RTL8111B/8111C Gigabit Ethernet Controller v2.15 (0880320)
PXE-E61: Media Test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM
no bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key

I don't know how to fix this at all.

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

Something is wrong with Hard disk or cables. Boot up from LiveCD of any distro/version and execute fdisk -l command in Terminal. Check if it lists partition structure of your Hard Disk correctly.

sudo fdisk -l

*Its small L in fdisk -l.

[belladivediva]

Thank you for the welcome, and for the help. I am trying to download an ISO right now, and then burn it to the disk.

[D-cat]

...or the controller on the MB. I hope it's not the hard drive itself, since the data would likely not be recoverable.

..X,

[ptkobe]

check the BIOS boot parameters?

[kados]

you could try to reinstall grub, see if that helps

[belladivediva]

It works when I put the ubuntu cd in, but I can't run fdisk -l like that. I tried to just reinstall ubuntu and I got to the partitions..Nothing showed up and it wouldn't let me move forward.

[D-cat]

What is the exact output of

sudo fdisk -l

?

[belladivediva]

there wasn't any output. i typed it in and hit enter and it just went back to the user@user thing. it did nothing. when i tried to reinstall, it got to the partitiions and nothing showed up..just blank. my husband thinks it could be a hard ware problem..

[D-cat]

It's definitely hardware. We're just trying to ascertain if the hard drive is even seen by the BIOS. Looks like it might not. Questions:

1. When cold booting, does the computer take an unusually long time before it delivers the POST beep and starts loading the CD?

2. If you enter the BIOS Setup (usually F1 or F2 prior to POST beep, though could be F12, Ins, or Del depending on BIOS set) and head over to the Hard Disk setup area (also locations vary by BIOS), do you see any indication that your hard drive has been detected and set up?