Can boot on Minimal Fastboot, error on Thorough Fastboot

I am having a strange problem with my Dell Latitude E5520.
This morning my laptop wouldn’t boot. I was getting a ‘Boot Device Not Found” error.
I have found a workaround of sorts. I went into the BIOS/Post Behavior/Fastboot and changed the setting from ‘Thorough’ to ‘Minimal’. Now I can boot from a cold powered down status. As soon as I change the setting to ‘Thorough’, I start getting a ‘Missing Boot Device’ error again.
I am trying to figure out what’s happening here and how to fix it.
Details:
I use this laptop for work (I’m a contract applications developer).When I first got this laptop (about two weeks ago), I immediately removed and put aside the hard drive that came with the laptop. In its place, I put a new Mushkin 120 Gb SSD, which I then proceeded to load Windows 7 Ultimate N SP1 (64 bit) and MS Office 2010 Professional Plus (32 bit) on it along with all of my other apps.
I've been having all sorts of problems with Outlook over the last week so yesterday I again reloaded my entire system. I deleted the partition and then loaded the OS. I next loaded the Dell drivers, although I didn’t load the Conexant modem software (no plans to use a modem). I also didn’t load the Bluetooth drivers since; again, Bluetooth isn’t on my agenda either. It may be these omissions are part of my problem; I don’t know. I do have a Wireless Modem DW5630 Mini Card which I purchased separately. I installed the driver and Mobile Broadband Utility Connection Manager for the card.
Anyway all seemed to be copacetic last night when I shut things down. I was having a small problem with my email account setup, but, at least everything seemed to be running OK.
This morning, when I tried to power on the computer, I got the following errors:
PXE-E61 Media test failure. Check cable
PXE-M0F Exiting Broadcom PXE ROM
No boot device found. Press any key to reboot machine.
In the BIOS, I went to System Configuration/Integrated NIC and changed the setting from ‘Enabled W/PXE’ to ’Enabled’. Now when I went to reboot, I got the following:
No boot device found. Press any key to reboot machine.
Not sure if one can really call that an improvement, but at least it changed things.
Anyway, the next thing I did was to remove the SSD from the laptop and replace it with the original hard drive. That booted OK. I hooked the SSD to the laptop via the ESATA port and ran a Check Disk; no errors. Ran a virus scan; completely clean. I used Windows Explorer to look around. Everything looked OK.
I swapped the SSD back into the laptop. I was still getting the “Boot Device not found” error. I connected the original hard drive to the laptop via the ESATA port. I changed the boot sequence to boot from the ESATA device and the laptop powered on without error.
Now here’s where it gets interesting…
Once the laptop was up and running after booting from the original hard drive connected to the ESATA port, I found that I could disconnect the original hard drive from the laptop so that the laptop was rebooting from the SSD and the reboot worked! If I tried a ‘cold’ boot (i.e. starting the laptop up from a completely powered off status) with the SSD, I got the ‘Missing Boot Device’ error. But as long as the laptop was already running, I didn’t get the error doing a reboot.
I talked with Dell Tech Support about this. They suggested I update my BIOS, which I did. That didn’t fix it. They suggested running the pre-boot diagnostics. I’m not getting any errors on the diagnostics. I tried Windows Repair. Windows isn’t detecting any errors either.
I have found a workaround of sorts. I went into the BIOS/Post Behavior/Fastboot and changed the setting from ‘Thorough’ to ‘Minimal’. Now I can boot from a cold powered down status. As soon as I change the setting to ‘Thorough’, I start getting a ‘Missing Boot Device’ error again. I can live with leaving the Fastboot setting at ‘Minimal’ for now, but I’d really like to get this fixed.
There’s something here that BIOS doesn’t like about my setup. My first thought was there may be a missing file. But now I’m beginning to think it may have to do with the way the disk is partitioned. But, in truth, I really don’t know what’s going on here.
Has anyone seen this before? What should I do next?

 

I was betting this was a useless forum for getting any suggestions on how to resolve the issues with my Dell Latitude E5520. Nonetheless, I signed up to see if I was wrong. I wasn't.

 

Does your SSD use a SandForce controller? If so, I would not be surprised by any of this. Dell OEM SSDs are made by Samsung, and those are the only ones guaranteed to give you trouble-free operation. If you can still return the SSD, I would do that and look for a Dell OEM SSD on eBay.

BTW, there's no reason to force a thorough boot every time. I think they started making it default on the newer systems, so you'll want to set it to minimal. This is just an aside though, as it's not the real culprit.