Disk Boot Failure, insert disk

Bit of background, XP locked up yesterday, so I used the front panel button to turn it off. Upon reboot, main HDD was not recognized in BIOS so I reseated the cables into the mobo, rebooted and the HDD was recognized but I got the disk boot failure error. Rebooted to CD and repaired the boot. All was well until I rebooted again today, same error, but now fixboot won't stick. The only way I can boot to XP is by having the CD in the drive and wait until the option screen shows up, I have a second XP for testing, basically a throw away.

This may or may not be relevant, I got a BSOD a few days ago when loading Ghost machine_check_exception 0x0000009C though after repairing it loaded fine from CD. I have also run chkdsk and Data Lifeguard diagnostics and all is clean. Any ideas? TIA

 

Sound like a power supply issue. How old is you power supply ???

 

Have you also got GO Back on the machine? I have found it incompatible with System Restore causing random freezes or BSODs until one of them is turned off. This is on quite a few machines


Studio T

 

Maybe a bad boot.ini file? Or ntldr or ntdetect.com?

 

Thermaltake TruePower 420W, some 1.5 yrs. old. I'll get my specs up in sig.

Nope, haven't touched that one yet,

As to bad boot.ini etc. I assumed a fixboot/fixmbr would solve the issue. This same procedure worked fine yesterday after many reboots (I have Vista) but not today. Thanks guys.

 

Aarghh, sig's not working.

ASUS A8N-E
AMD64 Venice 3000+
2x512MB DDR
eVGA 7600GT
WD 250 and 160 HDDs
one optical
Thermaltake PurePower 420W

LOL, new sigs only work on new posts. OK then.

 

for the record sigs are now limited to 2 lines

 

Hehe ya, but I never had the problem of posting my fans like some do. confused

 

Well, I'm out of ideas so I will change the SATA port on the mobo I'm connected to, I have two more. Maybe something fried.

 

Just out of curiosity... what happens if you put that hard drive in another system?

/Mimsy

 

Hmm, I could put it in my old !GHZ Celeron, Never thought of that. It would eliminate any other variables. Now why didn't I think of that?confused hehe Thanks Mimsy, at least it will narrow it down one way or the other.

EDIT: I just remembered, no SATA support on the Celly.

 

Strangest thing just happened. For the heck of it, I booted to Vista DVD and there was my original setup with Vista and Legacy options. Chose my XP. Worked great until I rebooted. Too bad that I got back a disk boot failure with no disk in the optical drive. :banghead I really hope it's not hardware! No money.

 

It's more complicated than that.

fixboot is per partition it writes a new boot sector to a specific partition

fixmbr is per disk repairs the master boot record of a device, which may refer to several partitions

Boot.ini is an ordinary file, you can edit in notepad, which lists the bootable partions and where to find them. It refers to any number of disks and partitions on them. It is used to control which OS is booted and displayed on the boot options screen, if you have more than one OS loaded. It lives in the root of the first hard drive.

bootcfg
allows reading and editing of boot.ini from a command prompt.

You can get to all of these from the recovery console. You can also get help and a list of the options about each command by typing 'help command' Obviously if you have several partiitions / disks you have to at least specify which you are working on.


Hope this helps


Studio T

 

18 months old and built with my loving hands. The battery has never been changed but I'll do a reset when I can. Thanks

@studiot Thanks for the primer.

 

I installed a fresh copy of Vista on my second drive and that didn't fix the issue. I'm going to get another HDD, I need the space anyway, so I'll just leave the Vista DVD in the drive so's I have all my boot options available. I'll try the hardware options when I get the drive and do a marathon if need be. Thanks all.