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DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER
Golden Leg
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Oh, the agony!
I was enjoying a bit of Dungeon Siege II last night, when a blue screen of death violently materialized on my screen. It goes through its whole deal, "Dumping physical memory, etc," and then the computer restarts.
The problem is: instead of booting right up and going to Windows XP, it begins to boot and then declares, "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER."
I've checked all of the cables; they're in the same place they were two years ago. I've checked the BIOS; the boot sequence is: hard drive, CD, floppy.
What have I done to incur the wrath of my computer? Also, if I go along with it, do I lose all of the data on my hard drive?
I was enjoying a bit of Dungeon Siege II last night, when a blue screen of death violently materialized on my screen. It goes through its whole deal, "Dumping physical memory, etc," and then the computer restarts.
The problem is: instead of booting right up and going to Windows XP, it begins to boot and then declares, "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER."
I've checked all of the cables; they're in the same place they were two years ago. I've checked the BIOS; the boot sequence is: hard drive, CD, floppy.
What have I done to incur the wrath of my computer? Also, if I go along with it, do I lose all of the data on my hard drive?
Golden Leg on
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But getting your computer to boot up again properly, that could be hard. Have you tried swapping out the IDE/SATA cables? It could be as simple as a bad cable that had to act up some time.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136150
On sale at Newegg right now, that is an awesome deal for that drive.
So, yeah... I'd say shut the system down and do something else for an hour or so. Then try again.
Do you happen to remember if the BSOD said anything memorable?
Do not engage the Watermelons.
The only thing I remember about the BSoD was that it told me it was beginning to dump physical memory.
EDIT: I'm wondering if one of my habits may have contributed to this problem. Whenever I turn my computer off, the power supply squeals. So, in turning my computer off, I shut it down the right and proper way and then flip the power supply switch. Every time.
I have a SATA cable running from a connection on my motherboard labeled "SATA 1" to my hard drive. I'm pretty sure that's correct.
Here's where I get confused. I have a four-pin connection and an elongated-version-of-the-SATA-cable connection on my hard drive. Do I run a cable from my power supply to the four-pin connection, to the elongated SATA connection, or both? From what I've read, both is a nono. Other than that, the instruction manuals I've read have been either vague or ignorant of the possibility of the Legacy 4-pin connection.
I should have taken a picture of my setup before I started fiddling with it.
There is a distinct possibility that the drive is dead, which sucks (god knows how many drives I've lost over the years). The BIOS not seeing the drive is a troubling sign. You might try hooking it up to SATA2 or one of your other SATA ports on the motherboard, perhaps (not likely but possible) your SATA1 connector has gone bad. If it still does not show up, you may try hooking it up externally via a USB->SATA enclosure - NewEgg, Best Buy, all the usual suspects carry them.
Thunks and thuds mean head damage. Drive is toast.
Loud white noise like sand rattling around is loose debris, probably from a bad head crash. Call a hearse.
Quiet, repetitive grinding means bad blocks. Recovery programs can get you out of this tight spot unscathed but the more you run the drive, the greater chance you have of making things worse. Bad blocks can quickly morph into the above problems without warning.
Nothing but the quiet whirr of the platters spinning. A communication error perhaps? Maybe a bad control board. You'd have to replace it with another control board from the same model drive. Data recovery services can do this for you.
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
I've looked at a few things to hook the drive up externally. Do I need an external enclosure or just a set of cables? The prices for these don't make much sense to me.
BYTECC BT-300 USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA Adapter - Retail
Rosewill RCW-608 USB2.0 Adapter For IDE/SATA Device (Include Protection case) - Retail
VANTEC CB-ISATAU2 SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter - Retail
StarTech USB 2.0 to SATA IDE Adapter Model USB2SATAIDE - Retail
Rosewill RX-358-S SLV (Silver) 3.5" SATA to USB & eSATA Ext. Enclosure w/Int.80mm fan - Retail
Rosewill RX35-AT-SU BLK Aluminum 3.5" Black USB 2.0 External Enclosure - Retail
Read my above post for an overview of possible mechanical failures. As long as you don't have any of those, the BIOS not recognizing the drive is not a death sentence. You'll need a directory repair or data salvage program, though.
What?!
EDIT: I should add that when the new hard drive was connected externally to another PC, it ran well. The old hard drive is as dead as a doornail in either case.
Just for shits and giggles, try resetting the CMOS via the jumper or popping out the battery. Usually the jumper is the way to go. Don't really expect it to do anything, but just do it to say you did.
The thing that's tipping me off about the controller is that the new drive doesn't work either. it sounds like there's both damage to the disk and to the motherboard.
To rule it out, if you haven't already, swap cables and ports around with the new drive. That'll tell you what's up.
If your configuration was set up to only have one SATA HDD while shit was functional, it sounds like your SATA controller got fucked. Otherwise, I'm talking out of my ass.
Might be a sign your PSU is up to mischief. I recently replaced mine after it developed a squeal, and the random occasional USB device failures I'd been experiencing went away completely.
I've made some progress. I plugged the hard drive into another SATA port, SATA 5. The BIOS wasn't recognizing it when I plugged it into SATA 1, 2, 3, or 4. The BIOS now recognizes the hard drive. I even installed Windows XP on it.
However, the BIOS refuses to boot from the hard drive. I can see via Windows Setup that there's a healthy partition on the hard drive with Windows XP installed. My boot sequence is the following: hard drive -> optical drive.
EDIT: It seems the BIOS thinks my optical drive is a hard drive. It's listed as the IDE Primary Master Drive when I have the BIOS auto-detect. When I disabled the option to boot from an optical drive, it still booted from it when I inserted Ubuntu/hard drive diagnostic software/Windows XP.
Did you have DDR or DDR2 RAM?
You'll probably be OK with a new mobo+cpu, and then DDR2 RAM if you don't already have it.
if you can't afford a whole new machine right now, I'd try ebaying a s939 mobo, because otherwise you're starting from scratch.