Won't boot to hard drive

My computer was working fine until I brought it to a friend's house and plugged it into a socket that didn't have a surge protector. Oops. It would run the fans and start to power up, but then quit. I replaced the power supply with an old one I had lying around, and now it would power up, but my system wouldn't boot from hard drive. I got my windows XP cd and did a reformat, everything went fine, but it still won't boot from hard drive after OS installation.

I've been working on this for a few weeks now and have run several tests. I've come to the conclusion that it's probably a hardware issue, but I can't figure out what part of my computer needs to be replaced.

The error I get when trying to boot from hard drive is either "no boot filename received" or "disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter" (depending on which motherboard I'm testing it with)

Tests I've done

Hard drive: works perfectly fine in another system (when set up as a second hard drive). ran diagnostics tools from maxtor's website and found no errors

Ide cable or port in motherboard: system recognizes the hard drive in bios. I made sure I'm using a 133 cable for a 133 hard drive.

software issue: Reformatted the hard drive installing both windows xp and Ubuntu. Both OS install fine, but don't boot from hard drive after reboot. Ubuntu actually runs perfectly fine off the live cd option before reboot.

motherboard or cpu is failing: Pulled a motherboard and cpu from a working system, same issue.

system bios boot options: In both motherboard bios, made sure to boot from hard disk, even testing while disabling all other boot options.

memory: checked the ram in another system, added another stick of ram. ram is working properly when running the system off the live cd option of Ubuntu

The only thing I haven't really tried is taking a new hard drive, installing it, reformatting it, and seeing if it boots with this system. But I don't have an extra hard drive anywhere, and since it works in another system and passed the diagnostic tools from maxtor, I'm looking for other options before buying a new hard drive. I also haven't tried buying a brand new power supply, but the system runs fine off the live cd, so I don't see how that could be related to a power supply.

Any suggestions for further tests I could run would be greatly appreciated.

 

it might not be related to the power supply, and could be something just decided to fail at the wrong time, ,,,,, what about cords to the HD, maybe you looking in the wrong place ,,, "just a gess iam not a pro", but things have happened to me like that, wierd things happen,,, good luck mate

 

does it tell you the gigs of the HD? in bios? it might not be related to the power supply, and could be something just decided to fail at the wrong time, ,,,,, what about cords to the HD, maybe you looking in the wrong place ,,, "just a gess iam not a pro", but things have happened to me like that, wierd things happen,,, good luck mate
sorry double post

 

Well since he is able to install OSes onto his HD; they at least detected the HD in order to install. Master boot record may be failing to allow you to boot from the HD. Get a bootable floppy and do chkdsk in the command prompt to check for bad boot sectors. It might be caused by a virus or some power surge or something. If there are bad sectors, you might as well get a new HD, cause it ain't happening.

 

New Tests

IDE: Hard drive information suchs as disck size are viewable in bios. Tried pin settings for master and cable select. Tried changing Access Mode through bios, CHS, LBA, Large, and auto.

I haven't tried manually changing the Cylinder, Head, Precomp, Landing Zone, or Sector through bios because I wouldn't know what to try changing them to.

Hard Drive bad sectors: Loaded the system on Ubuntu's live cd and ran badblocks read-only test for the harddrive. It displayed "done 344" the first time I ran it (not sure if that's the number of bad sectors some kind of code) then repared broken system with an Ubuntu boot disk, reinstalling the Grub, but it still won't boot. Tried reformatting with Ubuntu and reinstalling, then ran badblocks again, "done 697" this time, won't boot, tried reinstalling Grub again, still wont' boot. Then I tried a non destructive write-read test (instead of the previous read only tests) and gave no errors. I then ran fsck telling it to first check for badblocks again (read only) and then check and fix the file system. This time it returned no errors, but it still won't boot to hard drive. Same "no boot filename received" message as always.

I found a bootable cd .iso for checking Maxtor hard drives, and I'm going to try that next. Also, I have a serial ATA hard drive I could test on the system, but my motherboard doesn't have an serial ATA connection on it, so I'd have to install a PCI card (which also has firefire and other connectors) but I'm afraid it might be difficult to set up a system that would boot from a hard drive not directly connected to the motherboard.

 

Have you tried Super Fdisk...
completely erase partition ..then create partion ..surface check....
Then run Maxblast4...erase all partitions ..write zeros..repartition ....
Run Super Fdisk again only run surface test...check if bad sectors are gone....
This worked for me.......

 

Problem Solved

Thank everyone for the suggestions. Yes, the issue was my hard drive. I'm guessing when I plugged it into the wall without a surge protector and it fried my power supply, it also caused bad sectors on my hard drive. I was able to remove all the bad sectors from my hard drive, but the problem was that the boot sector was ruined, making it impossible to load an OS or boot from that drive, even though it would reformat and save files without error.

When I removed the faulty IDE hard drive and installed a new SATA hard drive it reformatted, installed, and rebooted without error.