Resolved missing boot disk

I have someone who shut down his 5 year old HP Pavillion normally one evening last week (Vista Home, 500GB Seagate HDD, 4 Gig RAM) and the next morning upon starting it up got the black screen with the message boot disk missing.

I pulled the HDD and backed up all data. I then ran SeaTools to test the drive and there were no problems during either the short or long test and it indicated that SMART had not been tripped.

I reinstalled the HDD and ran the Windows repair utility from the recovery partition and all came back fine. Data was OK, all programs in tact and running normally. I installed a couple of needed updates and returned it to the owner.

Last night the computer was shut down normally and this morning the same thing has happened, boot disk missing.

As it would not appear to be a hard disk issue, is there something else I should be looking at?

Would I be best to reformat and reinstall Windows from scratch?

Any thoughts appreciated, thanks

 

Actually, I replaced that the week before with a new one

 

Is the system trying to boot from something non-bootable that they might have plugged in? For example: Floppy, CD or DVD, USB hard drive, Flash/Thumb drive, a SD card in a USB printer, etc. I'd ask them to try:

1) removing all removable disks/discs from the system,

2) powering the system down,

3) disconnecting everything USB (except the mouse and keyboard of course),

4) and then try powering the system back up again

 

Thanks Doc - there was nothing plugged into the machine when I had it here in my office and it wouldn't boot then so, I doubt that that is an issue.

That said, I don't know for sure about that now that it is back in their home but will investigate. Unfortunately, they are away until Monday of next week so I shall have to pick up the thread again then.

 

I have had the computer in my office for a couple of days now and find that the SATA connection on the MB is causing the problem on an intermittent basis. Sometimes it starts, other times there is no boot disk found.
I switch the SATA cable to another connection and it starts fine repeatedly.