Mac OS X boots to “No bootable device — insert boot disk and press any key”
This is a pretty scary problem if you run into it. According to the guy at the Apple Store, it's a pretty rare one too. Being such a rare problem, it's not very well documented. It just showed up one time when I rebooted the computer. More or less, when your computer restarts, it's goes to white screen for a while and then it goes to a black screen with the white text "No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key" and hangs there. Restart the computer and it does the same thing. Needless to say, when you need to take an online quiz before midnight, you start freaking out.
First of all, you will only have this problem if you had BootCamp running another OS on your computer at some point. If you haven't, then this is not your problem. The issue is that BootCamp did not unpartition your Windows disk space correctly when you removed it. It happened to me because I had Windows 7 on my computer via Boot Camp, but then I uninstalled it and then put it on via Parallels (good choice, by the way.)
After some consulting with my owners' manual that night of the quiz, I found if you hold option (the alt key) during the white screen, it will allow you to select your Mac OS X partition and start your computer as per normal. You can actually keep doing this every time you start up if you prefer. I actually thought it would kind of be a nice security feature because if your computer restarted, no one would be able to figure out how to start your computer.
As I imagine most of you want to fix it, here's how you do it. Open Boot Camp Assistant from Applications/Utilities. Going through Boot Camp Assistant, create another 5 GB partition as if you were going to install Windows again. After the partition is created, use Boot Camp Assistant and delete the partition. If you do it correctly, it should fix your problem.
Your alternative is just to go the Apple Genius Bar and let them do it. That's how I did it because I couldn't find anything on the Internet that showed me how to do it.
April 7th, 2012 - 09:55
Thanks it worked… held down option and re-did the partition
April 11th, 2012 - 12:32
Thank you so much. Went through all of the steps in your post, starting with the freaking out part, then the alt part. Worked perfectly.
April 16th, 2012 - 13:49
It’s because Windows requires to be the first drive in the list, and since it can’t be read, it blocks at this point…
April 20th, 2012 - 12:35
Actually, it can also happen just from playing with the startup disk setting in the Settings. I had not done anything with Boot camp but had booted from a Linux LiveDVD, by setting the DVD as the startup disk (instead of using the option key during startup to select). When I rebooted to go back into OS X I did so with the option key as the DVD was still in there. I left the computer running and/or sleeping for weeks. Next reboot, the Startup Disk setting was still on the DVD drive.
As it couldn’t even find that medium, it wouldn’t load the driver for my wireless keyboard to pick up the option key, so i had to go hunting for a wired USB keyboard in the middle of the night. Whatever happened to a user-definable boot order? EFI has many technical benefits, but this sort of thing shows that the startup configuration is just not right. Failover booting should be configurable. And on machines delivered only with wireless keyboards, you should always be able to start with one.
April 26th, 2012 - 02:27
Thanks man, you just save me from a heart attack!!!!! Your my hero
May 2nd, 2012 - 02:10
A huge thanks Brian saved my hours
May 11th, 2012 - 15:51
Thanks very much. I got this today at school while grading an exam and panicked, thinking all my student’s grades had vanished.