Disk boot failure error on startup

[Astrotolus]

When I cold boot my system after it has been off for a while, most of the time I will get an error right after reading the ide devices that says something "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press any key to continue". Something like that, I can't remember exactly. Anyway, it fails to read my hard drive, but it does detect it along with my cd reader and writer. I use the Crtl-Alt-Del and reboot and it will read fine. I'd say I get this message about 80% of the time after a fresh boot.

Any idea what's causing this? It's been happening for a good while now, several months at least. I do have the fsb o/c'd to 143 MHz from 133. Maybe I'll try setting the fsb back to default and see what happens.

Thanks.

 

[WarmAndSCSI]

Hey, welcome to the forums.

Well, your HDD detection problem could be caused by an overclocked FSB since the southbridge which the on-board ATA controller is housed in is running off the PCI clock divisor. So, it could be malfunctioning because of the higher clock speed on the southbridge, especially since it provides a different clock to UDMA-5 devices like your HDD (?). It is strange that it would be detecting other optical devices still. Another cause could be the HDD beginning to go bad or being shot. I would try this hard drive in another machine and run manufacturer's disk utilities on the drive and check for errors; if the BIOS properly detects it of course. The worst case would be a bad HDD. First, try lowering the FSB down to the factory-recommended clock and then manually set the host rate on the HDD's IDE profile to the lowest speed (PIO 4 would do) and disable UDMA and DMA on it. Then see if it detects it. If it does, then try enabling UDMA/DMA again. I hope this helps.

 

[Astrotolus]

Thanks for the advice. I will set the fsb back to 133 and see what happens, and reply here.