I had already removed the disk but had not tried to start it without one. As per your suggestion I have now done that. It took about 2 mins longer then it used to but it did get me to the no boot device message. As I had already tested the disk and it appears good I put it back in and started the machine. It completed the hardware start up in the usual time and booted the OS I have on that disk. As a final test upgraded the OS on that disk and it is 100 percent good now.
I have a Dell R320 that has been running well for about 2 years. All of a sudden I find that the screen was frozen and that the mouse and keyboard do not function. After rebooting the hardware it told me that there were no disks installed. I reconfigured the machine and it sees the disk as it did before. Now it gets to the point of initializing but freezes there . If it had not froze the next step would have been collecting the life cycle data. Therefore my question is if there is any software I can run to find out what has gone wrong? I did test the disk in question in another R320 I have and it boots normally. Any suggestions or questions are welcome.
Software tools to troubleshoot a Dell R320