'boot disk failure' on random reboots

[angmang]

ever since i upgraded an 80gig maxtor to an 300 gig maxtor, ive been having problems on rebooting and getting the message 'disk boot failure, insert boot disk and press enter' it happens probably 50% of the time i reboot. so i had to reformat, i had no other way around it. but then i found out a way around it the next time it happened. i disconnect the cdrom and plug that ide wire to the old 80gig hardrive with winxp still in it. it boots up, but from the 300gig, not the 80gig. then its all good, i reconnect the cdrom and im good till it happens again. i know its not a virus, i have use kaspersky scanner that scans everyday. also.. when the failure occurs, it does detect the hardrive in the bios, but not the os. could it be the hard drive, windows or something else?

 

[KAZANI]

My guess is you are using a bad cable. Try a new good cable.

 

[angmang]

i dont know if its the cable ive been using the same cable with the old hard drive when this never happened. this only started happening when i got a new hard drive.
i found another method that bypasses the disk failure.
i boot up with the winxp cd, run the setup, then quit. then it boots.

im interested in preventing it now that i have a few ways around it. next time it happens ill try a different cable.

 

[dfuze]

Sounds like what just happened to me the other day. I just got my first SATA drive and added to my rig w/ 2 older 80gb PATA drives. When I tried to install windows on my new SATA drive, I noticed it was still trying to copy some setup files to the old drive. It wasn't until I unplugged the power to both of the old drives, then installed windows (with both the old drives unplugged, it had no choice but to install all files on the new drive). After windows installed, I plugged the old drives back in and now all is fine.

 

[niji1875]

maybe ur power supply has not enough power?

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: niji1875
maybe ur power supply has not enough power?

yep.


A machine that is cranky about getting booted but then otherwise remains stable once up is often indicative of a power supply problem.

 

[angmang]

300w powersupply

other gear:
asus a7v 8xx motherboard
512mb ddr ram
geforce4 vid card
300gig maxtor ata100
lg dvdrom 16x
m-audio revolution soundcard

whats the standard on powersupply these days?

 

[LiLithTecH]

Sounds as if you made each of the drives an Active PRIMARY Partition.
(formating will not change the status)

Doesn't sound like a hardware (PSU) problem at all....

 

[angmang]

ok i think with what just happened i think it might be the PSU

this time when i got the message again, all i did was disconnect the power from the cdrom, leaving just 1 hardrive in there. and it booted fine. i turned it off and replugged the power to the cdrom and it booted up fine.

 

[Smilin]

hehe yeah 300W probably doesn't cut it. I'm surprised you made it this far.

Modern Gfx cards can pull over 200Watts under load all by themselves.


Get a 550 and you'll be good for a while.

Checkout Hyper PSUs.. they just recently started selling outside the UK and are offering some really big-gun PSUs that are priced far below the usual suspects... antec, enermax etc.

 

[LiLithTecH]

Betcha if you put a PCI Video card in with the 2 HD's attached you get the same error.....

If the PSU was under powered whilst trying to play Fry Cry, Oblivion, and so on,
i would believe a hardware problem.

Booting up, NO......

 

[lyssword]

I had this prob with one of my comps, I think its because of bad mobo or something.. to bypass this boot disk problem I had to go in bios each time and press f10 and restart (not changing anything). That made the comp boot up to xp..