I have an older Gateway computer that I’m going to upgrade soon. Every time I boot, one message I get reads “Detect drives done, no any drive found”.
Huh? When I googled it, it seems that some people get this as an error message. I think (but am not entirely sure) that this phrase has appeared at boot since I first got the computer. I know it’s appeared for years and the computer has booted without problems.
So, what’s an any drive? Why does my Gateway seem to think the fact none is found is worthy of reporting?
Your computer has boot options. Sometimes you want the computer to start from a CD or DVD drive so you adjust the bios, which is a set of instructions in the computer. If your boot order has been changed recently, it might be looking for the OS in a drive other than C:
If no OS is found, it gives that message, after it goes through the remaining boot order D:>C:>USB>other if D is your CD Drive. Chances are though, that something is either wrong with the hard drive or a loose cable inside.
My Acer from ~2010 did this too. I think the eSATA (external SATA) port had a separate controller with its own BIOS, and that was where the poorly-worded message came from. And, of course, the main controller and BIOS had no trouble finding the (internal) SATA drives and booting.
One suspects that there could be a legacy bit of code that prints out the error message:
No <boot drive> drive found.
And sometime later a change to the system allowed “any” as the option to boot from, in addition to named drives. So, suddenly instead of saying “No C drive found” you get a useless message. And in the mess of bits and pieces of boot time code run around the system, something still runs this code. The idea that it comes from firmware on a separate controller that is not part of the proper boot path is not bad.
Brings to mind the old saw about “I can’t find the Any key.”
Which makes perfect sense. “Hey, dimwit, don’t you know that you need a keyboard attached to your computer? Go find one now and hook it up. I’ll just wait here. Let me know when you do. How will you let me know? Well, let’s see: It’s an input device. You figure something out.”
If you ultimately boot into Windows (or maybe Linux), my guess is that in BIOS you have a boot order sequence of the floppy, hdd, and then CDROM. IIRC that’s how the default order was.
So, when it looks for the floppy, you have that error, but it finds the hdd and you boot anyways.
You could go into BIOS and look for the boot sequence and put the HDD first and disable all the others. That way it just ignores everything but the hdd and boots.
Thanks all. It makes sense that the computer is trying to tell me that it’s going to boot from the hard drive since no OS disk was found in the CD or DVD drives (no floppy drive on this computer).
I wonder if newer computers still show this message, and/or if someone decided to reword it or prevent it from needlessly appearing.
Different manufacturers do their own thing. In general, as long as it runs and doesn’t cause too many problems for too many people, it’s not considered important. But you’re right, when the machine needs a message but the user doesn’t, it’s common to find ways to prevent it from being shown.
I used to work with a Korean programmer who was a good programmer but often was too proud to ask for help with his English. One of his favorite error messages was “it make error.” Became a bit of a running joke anytime something went wrong- “it make error”.
