Greetings to all,
I have two pcs.
and two pcs have had the following situation before.
i set the cd-rom as my primary boot device
when booting the windows xp professional, at the stage of verifying dmi pool data, sometimes it shows `boot disk failure.insert system disk and press enter', but if i have a windows installation cd in the cd-rom, and i don't press any button when it say `press any button to boot from cd', the system can boot perfectly.
Now i have my old pc having that problem again.
i don't know what is wrong, according to the threads i found on the Internet, it seems that there could be dozens of possible reasons, including failure disk, failure power supply, failure cable, failure mbr.
is this possibly because that sometimes the electricity loss at my place causing this problem?(abnormally shut down at loss of power)

what are the causes of your computers to the message shown on the screen?

any ways that i can specifically diagnose specific parts to see if they are the problems?

thanks alot


if i can't fix my computer back at my place(i'm living in college dorm), and make sure that it can be up and running with all hard drive working well, i can't use remote desktop to control bittorrent downloading..
it's really a great loss


please help me..

Does it also happen when you set the hard disk as primary boot device?

Do you at least have the HD listed as secondary boot device?

Thanks for your reply.
I'm using a asus A8N-E premium on my new pc.
I haven't check how it goes if i set the hdd-0 as the first boot device
but yes, when the bios is scanning for hard drives.
i have 5 hard drive connected to my computer
it found four sata hard drives connected to the original four sata ports, and the other on the siImage 3114 chip.
and my power is a Seasonic S-12 600W power, which should still work fine with 5 hard drives in the computer, if it's not broken, hopefully not.
last night, the desks of one of my three roommate and mine just had a black out.
i was watching stargate sg-1 when it happens.
then i recall that these things,(sudden loss of power), occurs many times to my computers, when they are back at my home.
so i wonder if the sudden power loss without normal windows shutdown would cause these things.

And this morning when i find out that there is power again, i turn on my pc at dorm.
and the computer recognize all the hard drives, but still show the `boot disk failure' message, this happened when i didn't put my windows xp pro installation cd in.

i've tried the repair function too, it'll work at that time, but it'll show up the message again the next time.

i just don't understand..
i know that both booting hard drives on my two pcs are having some problems.
the HDD on the old pc is quite old, and very very old seagate 12GB HDD, but it has been working fine over the past 6 years, and when i check it with HDtune, no bad sector turns up.
And the booting HDD on my new pc has been having problems of overheating, however, when i check it with HDtune, also, no bad sector turns up.

please someone help me..
(i've been checking this stuff using google search and someone on the Internet said that he suspected that some windows xp patches caused this thing. Is it possible?)
however, on my old pc, i reinstalled the windows xp pro without updating any windows xp patches(due to unable to use academic network), and i let my mom bring it back home, but the `boot disk failure' message still shows.

And this is not the first time, sometimes before i have this error message i just like reinstall the entire system, and then it'll work normally for some time before showing up the error message again.

Please HELP Me
Because i'm kind of short in money lately, i hope i don't have to buy everying new in order to just check which part is actually the problem.
Thanks

i'm now in my room at dorm, and i still get that message.
i first tried to set the hard disk to be the primary boot device
it show the same.
so i changed back to make cd-rom as my primary boot device
and i put in the windows installation cd without pressing any thing avoid the
then i can boot in the system.

If you have 5 HDs, are you sure you put the right HD as primary boot device? ASUS is a bit weird with their HD order (the order is reversed in Windows sometimes).

I would disconnect everything but the system HD, set the HD as primary boot device and see what happens. Then, if it works, start hooking up the rest of your drives tro see where it fails. You might want to consider fewer drives. It would not be surprising if the system is getting confused.

okay, i'll start trying..

but i thought the MB will scan through all drives to find the mbr section
and all my drives is using sata...

so if it too many drives were the problem, would it help if i hook a IDE drive on primary IDE as the os drive, and all other drives are sata?

thanks alot

I cannot help you with the mysteries of SATA and so on. But I am pretty sure that if there is only the boot drive present you will either find it or learn that it is not the plethora of drives causing the problem. You will have eliminated one possibility. Right now you have no idea. If it will not boot from the boot disk you also have a starting point in solving your problem: bad boot drive.