Disk Boot Failure - Win XP

[plaidfro]

I must have bad luck. I just built a new system, everything has worked great. I have never been happier with a computer and its performance. I hadn't booted up my computer for about a week, and yesterday I turned it on and right before the windows XP load page I get "Disk Boot Failure. Insert System Disk and Press Enter" I know this isn't good. It was acting like there was no OS loaded. Again I hadn't changed anything and everything was totally fine till this boot. I have 2 HDs, a Seagate 80 GB Serial ATA, and my old back up a Maxtor 30GB. After putting a startup disk in an going to the prompt the C: was now my old Maxtor 30 GB instead of the new Seagate 80GB. The Bios recognized both drives. So I unplugged the Maxtor drive and rebooted. After the boot disk takes me to the command prompt I can only read the A:... the seagate wasn't there but it shows it still on the Bios. So this morning I setup WIN XP SP1 again... XP loaded up fine. I was able to check the HD contents and all my old stuff was still there, minus somethings like Word and Excel. Any Ideas what happened? Any Diagnostics I should do? I don't want this to happen again... any guesses what causes this?

Comp Specs:
AMD 3000+ CPU
EPOX NPNA Ultra
Seagate 80 GB Serial ata
Maxtor 30 GB
1GB DDR Ram Corsair Value
Evga 6600 GT VC
Win XP SP 1

 

[D1gger]

It seems very odd, but I remember having similar symptoms when I had a CMOS battery fail on one of my systems. Maybe your new MB came with a bad battery.

 

[mechBgon]

Virus/worm/Trojan attack comes to mind too. There are some viruses/worms/Trojans that do TKO your Windows directory or other things needed for bootup. Not the greatest strategy for spreading themselves, but hey. You should be running WinXP SP2 with all the post-SP2 patches, and good firewall/antivirus software, and a hardware firewall (router) wouldn't be a bad idea either. WinXP SP1 is Swiss cheese.

 

[jjsbasmt]

Iv'e seen this on systems that are using a SATA drive to boot from and also have a PATA HD attached in the system. In every case it was related to telling the system which HD to boot from from a cold start. There was a setting in the BIOS and allows you to pick which HD either the SATA or the PATA to boot from. Don't know if this is the problem with yours, but worth a "look see".

 

[Scott66]

Also make sure you don't have a USB flash drive in one of the USB ports as many of the new MB's will try to boot from them if you haven't disabled it in the BIOS

 

[plaidfro]

So I guess I need to troubleshoot.

Is it:

A. CMOS battery is toast.

B. SATA Drive is having issues and I should get a replacement

C. Win XP just needed to be updated.

D. BIOS needs to be set up differently

I think that I am leaning towards C. Again everything loaded fine and ran beautifully for a month until this one boot. Also, the computer was only hooked up to an internet connection only for the initial boot. I didn't get any updates, because I brought it home and I don't have a home connection yet. My biggest concern is that I format the SATA Drive and reinstall all my programs and it happens again. But I would make sure that SP2 is on and all of its updates. What do you think I should do?