Disk Boot Failure ?

I've been having an odd problem as of late. When rebooting and post screen passes I get an error; "Disk Boot Failure, Insert System Disk and Press Enter". The problem is intermittent so it doesn't happen on a regular basis. Since there is no floppy in the drive I thought my floppy was going bad, so I disabled the 'Floppy Seek' option in the BIOS and removed the floppy from the boot sequence. Oddly enough the problem has returned. I have a DVD/CD-ROM drive, a CDRW drive, and a DVDRW/CDRW drive that were all in the boot sequence. It looks like this;

First Boot Device = CDROM
Second Boot Device = CDROM
Third Boot Device = CDROM
Other Boot Device = HDD0

After getting the error after removing the floppy from the boot sequence I thought there might be a conflict with one of the CDROMs. So as the error continued to appear (over the course of several weeks) I removed a CDROM one at a time from the boot sequence. Now, the only boot device that is listed is HDD0 which are my two WD 80Gb HDDs in a RAID0 array via a HighPoint Rocket Raid 133 PCI card. I stil get the error at times. Another reboot will make it go away sometimes, but other times I have to go into the BIOS and recheck everything(changing nothing) and save changes, before it will boot.

I'm running WinXP Pro SP1 with all the latest updates, all hardware has the latest drivers as well. I'm kinda stumped here as to what might be causing this nag. Any thoughts?

 

have you tried a new cable?

drivers have nothing to do with this issue. No drivers are even touched at the point of the bootstrap passing off to the OS.

 

Which cable? The one for the floppy or all others? I do have some extra EIDE cables laying around I could try.

 

the HDD cable (IDE)

 

Ok, will do.

 

Take out the DVD/CD-ROM drive, and it should be fixed.

 

I have two different EIDE cables on the HDDS now and took the CD/DVD ROM out and rebooted. I'm still getting this message. I went back into the boot sequence and did nothing but 'Save Changes' without changing anything, the 'Exit and Save Changes' and it rebooted fine. Any more thoughts?

 

It is possible the CMOS battery is bad. The Asus A7N8X Deluxe I'm using was reported to have a bad CMOS battery in certain batches. I'll run down to the store and see if I can find a battery for it. By the way, I took everything out of the boot sequence except the HDD0 and still got the same error.

 

Did this solve the problem? I've got a brand new motherboard, proc, ram, video card, psu, case ... & I have tried 4 dif cdrom drives that all give that message - even if they are the ONLY boot option!

When I try to boot to the hdd (taken from another system -- the only difference was there it was on a controller card ... that's my next step in TS, but ... the CDROM should STILL boot to a windows cd!!), it starts to load windows & then gives "inaccessible boot device, 0x7B"?

*Will probably open a new thread, but just wondered if this fixed it for you?*