Windows 10: Old Win 8.1 machine needs boot media

I have an old Windows 8.1 Dell machine. Before I toss it, I want to see if there's anything stored that I want to save. It won't boot up, telling me "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device." The pre-boot system assessment says "No Hard Drive detected, or disk controller not supported."I don't have any original documentation or recovery disk. FWIW, I do have the Dell Service Tag number. Is there any way to boot this thing up?Thanks.

:)

 

Installation media boots to command prompt

I've just booted from known working install media to see exactly what it does when booting. The sequence of events is...

1. Windows logo on a black screen
2. circling dots appear beneath the logo
3. light blue 'Please wait' screen with circling dots
4. a command prompt window (very briefly)
5. the initial Setup page appears

Do you see steps 1-3? If so, it appears you have stopped at step 4, suggesting that something on the disc cannot be read.

Does the disc boot properly in another machine? If so, try cleaning the laptop's drive lens then try booting from the disc again.

If not, make new install media with Microsoft's Media Creation Tool, either as a bootable USB, on an ISO that you can burn to another disc. At Step 8 in Option One of this tutorial you can choose between making a USB or an ISO.

Download Windows 10 ISO File

 

Disk boot failure after removing old Vista partition

Thank you for the reply, muchomurka! As I indicated in my post, I have already tried all the steps you suggested to no avail:

- I cannot choose startup repair since the computer does not boot from the installation media
- I cannot use command prompt since the computer does not boot further than the POST screen
- I have disconnected and tried out all hard drives individually.

Since I had Win 10 up and running a few hours ago, I can say with 100% certainty that none of the hardware is faulty.

The real mystery is, how come the system won't boot from any media without an empty disk containing an old Vista boot sector being on top of the boot priority list? And which steps to take now that I've cleaned this disk and it does not exist anymore?

Would appreciate any ideas and pointers!

 

Old win 7/8 photoviewer in win 10 ?

Hi !

I would like to use the old win7/8 photo viewer in my win 10 machine to watch photos.

Otherwise the old photoviewer works fine but the sorting of the pictures is annoying: if I

-have JPG and RAW files in same directory and

-sort them by type so that in file manager lists the jpg's first,

-double click the first JPG (the old photoviewer displays the first jpg correctly but) but

-when I try to see the next picture by pressing the arrow on bottom, the photo viewer shows the RAW file, not the next JPG (in win 8 this works fine).

Is there any possibility to change the old photoviewer to work as it does in win8 ?

Thanks for help, Martti