We bought a new Dell Computer from Best Buy in June for my wife to use for some special software she needs. Last week, she went to turn the computer on and it gives us the error

"boot device not found"

I read a few forums and one said this was a somewhat common in Dell computers. One of his solutions was taking the Hard Drive out and putting it back in. I tried this to no avail. Does anyone have any recommendations for computer repair? At the time it was the cheapest laptop Best Buy sold. Unfortunately my wife put some family pictures on there that we would really like to recover. Any help is much appreciated.

You can try booting from a Linux Live CD/USB to recover the files/troubleshoot, but if the computer can't find it from boot, I'm not sure this will help. It's worth a shot.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/31804/the-10-cleverest-ways-to-use-linux-to-fix-your-windows-pc/

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2147063/linux-to-the-rescue-how-ubuntu-can-help-a-computer-in-distress.html

The links will walk you through the creation and use of the disk/usb.

Alternatively, you can get an external hard drive enclosure...put the drive in that, connect it to a working computer (via USB), download and run the free program "Recuva" on the working computer, and see if you can pull the files you want from it. This has worked very well for me in the past.

Recuva

Thank you both.