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Odd HD boot problem.

L

lumen

Senior member
Occasionally (approx. 25% of the time) my computer upon startup will not boot to Windows, but will try hang, and then ask for a boot disk. If you press the power button and then turn it back on, it will in most cases boot normally to Windows, any ideas why this would happen?
 
It is probably because the hard drive is going or your bios is not set correctly.

When your machine boots up, it scans your system for hardware. The hard drive is not seen until it spins up. If it doesn't spin up fast enough, the system will not see it. When a drive is cold, the lubrication on the bearings is thicker so it takes longer for the drive to spin up. If your mobo is not told to wait, it doesn't find it.

If the drive is very old, it may be starting to go as the lubrication is not as good as it used to be. If you go into the bios, there should be a setting to increase the wait time as well so that the machine will boot up all the time.

Keep an eye on the drive though. Find the utility your hard drive manufacturer has and run it against the drive to make sure there are not problems with it.
 
btw, the drive is less than 4 months old.

I'm going to try that utility and also change out the IDE cable, could always be something simple like that.

Another odd thing is the CD-RW I just bought won't burn mp3's from HD either, but WILL copy a CD from the other drive. Comes up with a SCSI/IDE error... not exactly related necessarily, but maybe?
 
Umm... time to replace your HDD. If it's a new disk, and you're getting error messages and it's sometimes failing to boot, then you should exchange it for a new one while it's still under warranty.
 
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