Windows – Dell Vostro Desktop error

My first thought when you said this is simply that the hard drive has died.

You also said you had a problem with booting from optical drive. Based on the fact that you have upgraded to Windows 7, I take it that you know how to do this properly. I would double check and just make sure that it is set correctly and the disk is bootable.

Apart from that, I have seen power surges or similar take out single chips that make it hard to track down faults. If the machine is over 3 years old, it is possible that it is using a IDE optical and hard drive, so a failure in a controller chip could take out both.

However, I don't want to scare you, you should start by making sure that the BIOS recognises both the optical and hard drive, then try booting a different disk to rule that out.

If you can boot - it means that your boot cd/dvd is bad. If not, then it is possible of either a bad coincidence and the optical drive is bad or your motherboard is.

The above all only deals with the optical drive, whether you fix it or not, I think the hard drive is bad or has a boot problem. You may have luck formatting/repairing/reinstalling on it or it could be a physical problem requiring a new one... or again, lastly, it could be the motherboard.

It is really hard to know, but I hope this has covered everything.

I got this same error, setting the hard disk as 1st (and even removing the USB stick from the boot order) did not help. As far as I can tell, this is some interaction in the BIOS that prevents the win10 installer from thinking that the installation target drive is bootable, perhaps due to the particular USB key I was using (a USB 3.0 Kingston DataTraveler). I solved it by creating an "install partition" on the target disk using diskpart from the command line (shift+F10 in the installer):

> diskpart
diskpart> list disk
diskpart> select disk 0   # Choose the disk you want to install to
diskpart> clean           # will delete everything, hope you have backups!
diskpart> create partition primary size=100000 # size in MB
diskpart> create partition primary size=5000 # temporary install partition
diskpart> format fs=ntfs quick
diskpart> assign          # assigns a drive letter, it was D: for me
diskpart> active          # makes the install partition bootable
diskpart> exit

then copy the installer files from the USB key to the temporary partition:

c:\> xcopy c: d: /e /h    # /e for recursive with empty, /h for system files

and reboot, remove the USB key, and boot from the temporary install partition. The win10 installer will detect that the disk is bootable this time through & will let you install. When you're done with the installer you can remove the temporary partition and resize your main partition to take up the whole disk.