Disc Boot failure and power was off during vacation?

Question

Went on vacation and turned off my computer and all the power leading up to it and everything else in the same plug-in strip, including the monitor and printer. Have been sweeping for viruses frequently and scanned just before leaving. When I got back from vacation and tried to re-boot it said "Disc Boot Failure - unable to read hard drive - please insert system disc". Turned power off several times and tried again, all unsuccessful. The memory is only about 40% full so it can't be that.

What to do?

Answer 1

its possible that your bios battery is dead and forgot what drive is in your computer, enter bios setup and have it autodetect hard drives.
if the battery is dead the clock time will be wrong also, and all other bios settings.
if you reset the clock and hard drive you will be able to boot one time.
if this is the problem you need to replace the battery, it may cost you $2.


good luck
TV

Answer 2

Eek, this could be a great many things wrong...

#1 Your hard drive is bad.
#2 It all got zapped while you were gone regardless of the surge protector.
#3 Make sure there are no disks in any drives when you boot, such as cds or floppies.
#4 Possibly a virus, but highly doubtful... usually viruses that would do damage would totally cram your hardrive with nothingness which means it would not display the CANNOT BOOT TO DISK error, its not a virus ;).

What would I do?

#1 Open the computer, check the parrellel cable running from the Hard drive to the board... Try unplugging it (the cable) and turning the PC ON, let it say NO BOOT DEVICE, then turn it off, unplug all power, and plug the Hard Drive back in... You only need to remove the cable from the back of the hard drive to do this...
Sometimes this helps to reset a connection if it got frozen, or re-ensures that the drive is 100% connected. This is very similar to some of the answers above so I highly reccomend you try it.



#2 If #1 doesnt work, you can attempt a system restore, which will require using a windows xp cd that came with your pc... A windows restore installation will Re-configure the boot record and enable your Hard drive to boot, it will also REinstall windows, but it will do it without formatting or erasing any of your personal information... It will also redo the MBR (Master Boot Record) which is probably corrupt.

The link for restoring using the windowxs xp cd is here.
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm#RI


Most likely your hard drive had an error last time it shut down, it could be a sign of the hard drive going bad.
Could be that a virus somehow manipulated the mast boot record and erased it or something...

Usually this is a common error if the pc was somehow shutdown improperly...
Common messages are...

Cannot find boot device.
Error finding NTDRL
No boot device detected.
Disk is corrupt.
Invalid system disk, replace and strike key when ready.

Answer 3

First, open the case and check the ribbon cable (grey cable for IDE drives, red or blue cable for SATA drives) and more importantly, check the power cable as well (it's the white 4-prong molex connector). Possibly one of these two cables came loose. After all that, when the system boots back up, during POST it will give you an option to press DEL or F10 or some other key to enter the BIOS setup. WITHOUT CHANGING ANYTHING, check to make sure that the drive is being detected. If it's not, and you've checked the cables, there's a possibility that the drive has failed, or the onboard controller for the drive. Could also have a bad cable. Sometimes, they do fail all of a sudden, and for no reason.

If the drive is detected, exit the BIOS, let the system reboot. If the system still cannot find a bootable OS, then the Master Boot Record is probably shot, and if the system was powered off, then most likely the drive was starting to fail anyhow, and parts of it are physically starting to become unreadable.

Hope this helps

Answer 4

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER
BOOT: Couldn't find NTLDR, Please insert another disk
If you are trying to boot from the hard drive, make sure there is no disk in drive A.
If you are trying to boot from the floppy disk drive, try to boot from the hard drive and try to access the floppy disk. Then try to make sure that the disk has the necessary boot files and that the necessary boot files are not corrupt.
If you are trying to boot from the floppy disk drive, try to boot from another bootable floppy disk.
Make sure the hard drive power connector and ribbon cable are connected.
For hard drives, verify the primary partition is active.
If you cannot access the drive, enter the BIOS setup program and make sure the correct CMOS settings are chosen for the drive and make sure the hard drive and floppy controllers are enabled. Also check the boot order. Note: on most systems, you can use the auto detect feature to determine the correct CMOS parameters and to see if it can see the drive.
If you have two drives on the same IDE cable, try swapping the master/slave.
For IDE drives, check the jumper settings of all of the IDE devices, especially the master, slave or stand-alone jumpers.
For SCSI drives, check the jumper settings of all SCSI devices. Make sure the primary hard disk is set to SCSI ID 0. Check during POST to see if the SCSI BIOS is loading and finding any SCSI devices. If not, check the host adapter installation including IRQ, DMA and I/O settings.
For Windows* NT, 2000 and XP, start the Windows installation program and choose R to repair. You will then be asked for an emergency repair disk. If you don't have one, don't repair the Registry when asked to do so. When you are in the Repair utility, the repair utility will detect the system file and reinstall it in the correct place.
If using a removable/mobile IDE rack for the hard drive, verify the drive tray has been locked.
For DOS, Windows* 95, Windows* 98 and Windows* Me, try to reinstall the necessary boot files.
For DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me, try to run the FDISK /MBR command.
Make sure all device drivers have been installed correctly.
Swap the controller card, cable and hard drive, one at a time.

Hope this helps. Oh yes, check the CMOS battery.

Answer 5

Something happened that has corrupted your hard drive. Sounds like the computer knows the hard drive is there, but it cn not read the boot up files on it.

Recommend that you place the hard drive into another computer as a second hard drive. Hopefully you will be able to see the hard drive and get any files you need (pictures, music, vids, documents, etc) copied off it. Sometimes is you place the hard drive into another computer, it will "chkdsk" the hard drive and that by itself might repair the damage and get the drive working again.

Then put it back into your computer and try to reinstall Windows.

Answer 6

doesn't sound like a mobo hardware problem. i might want to attempt top right here: See if the BIOS wisely recognizes the pressure. bypass into setup (F12 or F1 or ctrl-esc or ??? because the device is booting) and then bypass to the disk settings. until eventually you've an _old_ device, the motherboard might want to be able to vehicle-come around the pressure. If it doesn't discover it, turn each and every thing off, open the case and reseat the means and IDE cables to the puzzling pressure and mobo. (they could from time to time come loose.) Then bypass decrease back and attempt #a million above. in the journey that your bois doesn't come around the pressure, the pressure itself might want to have failed. are you able to boot from a floppy disk or CD? if so, it truly is yet another indication that the pressure has lengthy previous undesirable. were given any acquaintances that would want to help? supply 'em a decision earlier you spend better funds with they undesirable mobo guy.

Answer 7

With power unplugged open the case. Disconnect the power from the drive and the ribbon data cable from both ends - then plug it all back in - often reseating the connections makes that problem go away.

Answer 8

I can give you a link that deals with hard drive problems.
Some hard drive problems can be easily fixed yourself by using easily available tools. I found the info at http://fixit.in useful. Try this site, if you can get what is required.