Sudden Disk Boot Failure error message?

[jesterb84]

Last night while watching a video on my PC, Windows Vista suddenly froze and I got a blue-screen about some sort of a driver error (I think, the screen flashed by too fast). My PC restarted and I was met with the error message:

"DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER"

I restarted and went into the BIOS. Neither my ATA133 HD nor my SATA DVD Burner were recognized in the BIOS. Changing various options and restarting did not help at all, not even restoring the BIOS settings to default.

I finally shorted the Clear CMOS jumper, turned the computer back on, and everything was okay. Both my SATA DVD Burner and ATA133 HD were detected and everything booted fine and remains so this morning.

What worries me was that my cables are very tight and I didn't touch anything inside the case. The error just spontaneously occurred, the 1st time since getting my new computer in 2 months time.

My specs are in my signiture. Does anyone have any idea what would be causing this problem? The obvious first though would be the hard drive but as said earlier, it seemed the mobo couldn't recognize ATA and SATA devices at the same time. It almost seems as if something managing disk drives somehow failed...

 

[nineball9]

Check the Windows Event Log for possible recurring errors such as drive errors, timeouts etc. While you probably won't find the driver error message, you may find some helpful troubleshooting events.

 

[Urtho]

Power spike/dip perhaps. Invest in a quality UPS if you don't already have one.

 

[jesterb84]

Thanks for the suggestions. I did check the error logs and didn't find anything unusual. I will look into a UPS for sure.