⏻ Boot & Startup Errors
No bootable device found — How to fix
No bootable device found comes from the BIOS — it cannot find a valid bootloader on any drive in the boot order. The fix is usually trivial (boot order) or requires rebuilding the BCD.
- Time
- 25 min
- Difficulty
- medium
- Applies to
- Windows 11, Windows 10
- Updated
- May 25, 2026
Error message
No bootable device found. Press any key to reboot the machine.
Symptoms
- ▸Black screen with "No bootable device found" or "Operating system not found"
- ▸BIOS detects the drive but won't boot from it
- ▸PC was working yesterday and won't today
Likely causes
- ▸Boot order in BIOS changed
- ▸Drive disconnected, loose SATA / NVMe seat
- ▸Corrupted MBR or BCD
- ▸Boot partition formatted / deleted
How to fix it — step by step
- 01
Check BIOS for the drive
Enter BIOS. Confirm the drive shows in Storage Information. If it doesn't, reseat the cable / NVMe — the issue is hardware, not Windows.
- 02
Fix boot order
Set the Windows drive as the first UEFI boot entry. Disable any USB boot devices that might be confusing the firmware.
- 03
Boot from Windows installer USB and repair BCD
Same Command Prompt → bootrec sequence as BOOTMGR is missing.
- 04
Rebuild EFI partition (UEFI only)
If the EFI partition was formatted, recreate it with diskpart and copy boot files there with
bcdboot.