Disk Boot Failure?

Esh · November 2007

So every now and again my PC will get a "DISK BOOT FAILURE: PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK" prompt when booting up. Generally turning the computer off for a minute and then rebooting will solve this little problem. I replaced my hard drive which I assumed was the cause of this problem and reinstalled the OS but I'm still occasionally getting the error. Any ideas?

tychon · November 2007

Is it an IDE drive? Since it's only occurring occasionally, I'd be inclined to think a connection issue -- since you've already swapped drives, you've probably also reseated the cabling. There could be a flaky wire in the cable itself giving you occasional read faults. If you have another cable handy, try swapping it out and giving it a go.

Even if it's not IDE, I'm still inclined to think connection issue, though I'm not sure how susceptible SATA is to such.

Esh · November 2007

tychon wrote: »

Is it an IDE drive? Since it's only occurring occasionally, I'd be inclined to think a connection issue -- since you've already swapped drives, you've probably also reseated the cabling. There could be a flaky wire in the cable itself giving you occasional read faults. If you have another cable handy, try swapping it out and giving it a go.

Even if it's not IDE, I'm still inclined to think connection issue, though I'm not sure how susceptible SATA is to such.

SATA and it's a different cable.

stigweard · November 2007

Backup all your important stuff now, in case it is a more serious problem. It could be any number of things from flaky power, to a bad hdd controller. Do you hear the drive spin up on the occasions where you get the no drive error?

Pastoriusk2 · November 2007

I have a somewhat similar problem to you and I would guess that our scenarios are roughly the same as well. Here is how mine plays out.

My main hard drive was starting to fail. It was an IDE drive. I went out to buy an SATA drive to replace it as my new main hard drive. Once I installed the new SATA drive, I left the old IDE drive in there because I wanted to move some things off the old drive to the new drive. I installed the OS onto the new drive. After getting it all set up with the OS and copying everything over that I would need, I disconnected the old IDE drive and it gave me the same error as you. Plugged it back in, and everything is gravy. The conclusion that I've come to is that when installing the new OS on the new drive, it didn't write a new MBR (Master Boot Record) to the new drive, but kept/modified the same MBR on the old IDE drive. Without the IDE drive plugged in, there would be no MBR to read off of which would give the error. The fix to this is something like using fixmbr in the recovery console or something, but I've been too lazy to do it and have just left the old drive plugged in there.

I've got the feeling that when you installed the OS on to your new drive, you also left your old drive plugged in so it didn't make a new MBR on to the new drive, but that wouldn't make sense since you say you replaced the old one meaning you have probably taken it out and are still able to boot. I would recommend searching for how to use fixmbr.

Esh · November 2007

Pastoriusk2 wrote: »

I have a somewhat similar problem to you and I would guess that our scenarios are roughly the same as well. Here is how mine plays out.

My main hard drive was starting to fail. It was an IDE drive. I went out to buy an SATA drive to replace it as my new main hard drive. Once I installed the new SATA drive, I left the old IDE drive in there because I wanted to move some things off the old drive to the new drive. I installed the OS onto the new drive. After getting it all set up with the OS and copying everything over that I would need, I disconnected the old IDE drive and it gave me the same error as you. Plugged it back in, and everything is gravy. The conclusion that I've come to is that when installing the new OS on the new drive, it didn't write a new MBR (Master Boot Record) to the new drive, but kept/modified the same MBR on the old IDE drive. Without the IDE drive plugged in, there would be no MBR to read off of which would give the error. The fix to this is something like using fixmbr in the recovery console or something, but I've been too lazy to do it and have just left the old drive plugged in there.

I've got the feeling that when you installed the OS on to your new drive, you also left your old drive plugged in so it didn't make a new MBR on to the new drive, but that wouldn't make sense since you say you replaced the old one meaning you have probably taken it out and are still able to boot. I would recommend searching for how to use fixmbr.

Yeah, the old drive is gone, gone, gone.

Esh · November 2007

stigweard wrote: »

Backup all your important stuff now, in case it is a more serious problem. It could be any number of things from flaky power, to a bad hdd controller. Do you hear the drive spin up on the occasions where you get the no drive error?

Well, I was going to wait a few months to build a new system, but maybe this is a sign to do it now...

telcus · November 2007

I get exactly the same thing, SATA drive on an nForce3 board (Gigabyte i think), about 1 in 3 times it'll not boot up properly. I just ignore it and restart, always does the trick and haven't had any adverse side effects. Hazarding a guess as to the cause, I reckon that when I first boot up, the hard drive hasn't initialised properly before it's polled by the BIOS.

I wonder if a BIOS upgrade is available to fix this, but it hasn't been enough of a deal for me to worry about that.

Esh · November 2007

telcus wrote: »

I get exactly the same thing, SATA drive on an nForce3 board (Gigabyte i think), about 1 in 3 times it'll not boot up properly. I just ignore it and restart, always does the trick and haven't had any adverse side effects. Hazarding a guess as to the cause, I reckon that when I first boot up, the hard drive hasn't initialised properly before it's polled by the BIOS.

I wonder if a BIOS upgrade is available to fix this, but it hasn't been enough of a deal for me to worry about that.

I'm using an Asus with I think the same chipset. I'll try a BIOS update.

Primesghost · November 2007

Your problems sounds like it may be serious. It's also possible that something in your system just isn't set right. Go ahead and update your BIOS as suggested earlier but also make sure to set your boot order so that the system isn't trying to boot from any other devices first (floppy, CD/DVD, etc.). It may be that one of your other drives, CD/DVD or floppy, is going out and the system is hanging up while checking them for a boot record. If this doesn't work then try unplugging any USB devices. It's also possible that your system is checking them for boot records and hanging up somewhere (as if it were going to boot from flash drive, external hard drive, etc.)

Pastoriusk2 wrote: »

My main hard drive was starting to fail. It was an IDE drive. I went out to buy an SATA drive to replace it as my new main hard drive. Once I installed the new SATA drive, I left the old IDE drive in there because I wanted to move some things off the old drive to the new drive. I installed the OS onto the new drive. After getting it all set up with the OS and copying everything over that I would need, I disconnected the old IDE drive and it gave me the same error as you. Plugged it back in, and everything is gravy. The conclusion that I've come to is that when installing the new OS on the new drive, it didn't write a new MBR (Master Boot Record) to the new drive, but kept/modified the same MBR on the old IDE drive. Without the IDE drive plugged in, there would be no MBR to read off of which would give the error. The fix to this is something like using fixmbr in the recovery console or something, but I've been too lazy to do it and have just left the old drive plugged in there.

Yeah, isn't Windows awesome that way? For whatever reason, whenever you install Windows it writes the boot record to the drive attached to the lowest ATA controller address that isn't being formatted. Basically, if you have three hard drives and you only want to format one of them to install Windows, it will write that boot record to one of the other drives that isn't being reformatted. It will decide which one to write it to based on lowest ATA assignment. ATA assignments are decided like this (lowest to highest):

IDE0 - Primary
IDE0 - Secondary
IDE1 - Primary
IDE1 - Secondary
SATA0
SATA1
SATA2
SATA3

And so on.

The best way to do things it to unhook all the hard drives in your machine except the one you want to install Windows on. Once you're done installing Windows go ahead and hook the other drives back up.

Penny Arcade

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