amd "dissk boot failure" problem

W

wannabecomedeat

New member
Hey,
Everytime I boot I get a "disk boot failure" message. There's no cd nor disket in the drives. I think it's the harddrive or something maibe something wrong in the bios. If it's just a misconfigured bios, anyone knows what I should look for in there that can create this error?

thnx
 
A disk boot failure can be 1 of many things:

1. Boot options are not set properly in CMOS
2. Non bootable CD or CD-R in computer
3. All boot devices set are not bootable

I'd say the most likely (if it just started happening out of the blue) would be number 3. Open up your case and see if there's a wide thin grey (IDE) cable and a small white connector with 2 black, 1 yellow and 1 red wire connecting to your harddrive. (If you have a sata drive, instead, you will have a very thin RED cable)

An IDE cable
The one on the right (Molex connector):
Sata Cable

In any case, try unplugging and plugging back in all the cables leading to your harddrive.

If this doesnt help, then perhaps your CMOS was cleared somehow and you haven't set a bootable drive. You can usually enter your BIOS by pushing the DEL button (PUSH XXX TO ENTER SETUP) or some button right as you start up your computer. Here's a list of popular entrance commands (ignore the part about reformatting and scroll down about half-way):

http://www.cyberwalker.net/faqs/reinstall-reformat-winxp/enter-BIOS.html

Once there, you will have to navigate your way into the boot menu: Look for a setting that says, Boot, Boot Order, Boot Sequence, First Boot Device, Boot Management, or something similar and select it. There should be an Auto-Detect command which should find a drive. Exit & SAVE your bios and try to reboot.

If this doesnt help let us know and we can go from there. Hopefully your data isn't corrupted on your harddrive (which may be the case, and you will need to start from scratch), but we'll hope for the best!

Good luck!
 
I had a disk read error that became a disk boot failure, that caused my old AMD 1.8ghz H/P laptop not to boot up, in my case the problem was that I had managed to fry one of my two 512 mb ram sticks as well as it's socket, that machine shared ram with the video card. After removing the bad stick of ram it hobbled along for a few more months, then the other ram socket gave up the ghost.

It wouldn't hurt to check the ram.
 
make sure the drive you are set to boot from AND the partition you are attempting to boot from is the active partition

Windows will happily install on a non active partition, appear to do everything right then on reload give you disk boot failure
 
thnx guys,

I kinda setted this computer up from the beginning. Harddrives are IDE, everything is connected ok. I'm not at home now, can't check the cmos settings, but what i'm sure is it's setted to boot from the right partition. I'll have to check for other stuff you mentionned, Hoyton.

I'n been using this computer for 6 months now so it's not a windows problem. Not to sure but I think the harddrive doesn't boot at all, I'll check if i can hear it.

thanks Strryder for the ram info, I wouldn't have tought it could come from there, I'll check them too.
 
I had a problem recently booting up my computer. I have two hard drives - one SATA with Windows installed, the other was an old IDE/PATA drive with nothing on it. Or almost nothing on it. There were a couple of files on it and I thought I didn't need them so I deleted them.

It turns out that (for some reason that is still somewhat of a mystery to me) those files were needed because they were what actually pointed the system to the Windows install on the other (SATA) drive.

I think my motherboard doesn't like mixing SATA and PATA or something...

I'm going to get rid of the IDE/PATA drive and see what happens (may have to use recovery console to repair the SATA Windows installation, not sure).



CP

(Posted on the off chance that you're having the same problem.)
 
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