When I start my pc (win xp home edition) I get a message saying disk boot failure. I reformatted the drive and reinstalled xp and it still does the same. What is strange though is that if I press the reset button on the front it boots up fine and xp runs ok. Any ideas? Thanks Richard
This may sound a bit obvious .... but have you checked the bios to make sure the first boot device is your harddrive?... It may be trying to boot from CD... if there's no cd in the drive and no secondary boot device is specified then it will fail to boot.
Mike.
Thanks for your reply. Ive checked the bios and first boot device is the hard drive and second boot is cd (no floppy drive installed).
Richard
I've had problems with a drive which ran too slow cold, but after it warmed up ran fine (for years)
Steve
Other possibility - do you have a USB hard drive / USB memory stick on any of your USB ports? My grandfather has exactly the same problem if I boots his machine up with a USB memory stick inserted when he turns the machine on. Long shot I know, but thought it worth a mention.
Matt
Hi, There is nothing connected to any usb port. There is a similar prob here but you have to pay to see the solution:
"Matthew Maddock" wrote >> When I start my pc (win xp home edition) I get a message saying disk boot
How is the hard drive partitioned?
Ahhh, I have an (very old!) account on there.
..
Hmmm, just a load of guesswork answers, nothing conclusive and nothing that hasn't been suggested here.
Anyway, Sounds like it could be that your hard drive isn't spinning up from cold properly. Might be time for a new one soon, at least they are pretty cheap to replace now. Have you got a spare you can try out to make sure?
Matt
No you dont....just scroll down the page
Further to my origonal question..... I hace tried another hard drive and it does the same. Also Ive now noticed that when its first turned on after being off for a while it takes several goes to start but once its warmed up it will start first time. Could something be wrong with the motherboard in that something needs to warm up first? Richard
Richard uttered summat worrerz funny about:
My machine does this randomly too, then insists I "press F1 to continue" before loading windows, that really P's me off too
Lee D
On or around Sat, 1 Jul 2006 22:57:26 +0100, "Lee_D" enlightened us thusly:
"Keyboard error - press F1 to continue"
that one is usually CMOS battery giving up the ghost.
My Toshiba laptop had been doing this for some years, it's not the battery (been changed, made no difference) - the Toshiba agent suggested a new main board. I just live with the problem instead as it does not happen too often.
What you do depends on the price of the board - laptops are too pricey IMHO.
Karen
Which bit are we talking about? The HD spinning up or the motherboard doing POST etc.
I assume its the motherboard as Ive tried two differant make hard drives and they both do the same.
Richard
As others have commented. Drives often take longer to spin up to speed and complete their self checks as they get older. Often too long for the usual PC startup diagnostics to have completed and be ready to boot. In the long term, I'd surmise that your drive is getting old and probably unreliable, in the short term i'd turn on full memory check or another BIOS feature that will extend the pc's startup. The drive may then be ready when it's time to boot. Alernativel, don't turn it off (I haven't turned my machines off for years).
How do I extend the pc's start up time? I have tried two drives, a Maxtor and a Samsung, both less than 6 months old and they both do the same thing.
Richard
If two drives are doing the same thing, I'd say it was unlikely that it is the problem. Possibly hardware related motherboard/ram. Got a similar (although not identical) problem with my wife's PC, I bought a new HDD thinking it would fix the problem but it didn't. but not really had chance to look into it further - we just leave the PC on all the time!! Been like that for about 6 months now!
Matt
If you get the same with 2 newish drives, I may be wrong. Check the BIOS to make sure the boot sequence doesn't include other devices (as already mentioned) - things like floppy/CD etc. Find this in the BIOS.
To lengthen the PC startup process, go into the BIOS and enable something like full memory check (there is usually a quick/full option). To enter the BIOS press the magical key (del or whatever is prompted on the screen during initialisation, before windows starts to load). To not change BIOS settings you are unsure about if you've never played with BIOS before...
Checked BIOS, boot other device is disabled, boot sequence at the mo is 1. HD, 2. CD. One thing I have noticed when it wont boot up is it says ' IDE Channel 0 Master [Iaxtkr 6Y080H0] When it will boot up it says IDE Channel 0 Master [Maxtor 6Y080L0]
So it seems that when it wont boot the motherboard isnt recognising the hard drive? Does that make sense?
Richard
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