OT: PC boot up

Richard · 2006-07-01T13:51:53+00:00

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?ThanksRichard

Jul 01, 2006 24 Replies

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Matthew Maddock 20 years ago

Does sound like a motherboard fault to me if you have tried two different HDD's and they both do exactly the same thing, especially with the odd boot message you are getting.

Might be a very long shot, as I've never had (or heard of) a faulty one, but have you tried a different IDE lead? Like I said, a very long shot, but worth a go before spending any money!

You could also try swapping the boot sequence so that CD is first and HDD is second - it won't do any harm and might give your HDD time to spin up if that is actually the problem, tho I somehow doubt it, you can never rule anything out with computers! I'm rather fond of saying that for something which works entirely on logic, computers are remarkably illogical sometimes!!

I can't remember if you said now, but is this a problem that has just appeared overnight for no reason, or has the PC always been like this?

Matt

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Richard 20 years ago

This is a problem that has suddenly happened. Was working fine until this. Also something else Ive just found is that the second IDE channel isnt working at all. Looks as the the motherboard is u/s. I have got a spare cable somewhere so I will try that first tho.

Richard

"Matthew Maddock" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@bt.com...

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David G. Bell 20 years ago

Not a long shot at all. I've had it happen, though it's more likely if a machine gets disturbed. And if you've tried two drives, don't forget to check the motherboard end of the cable is fully home.

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GbH 20 years ago

Some BIOSs have the option of enabling IDE channels independently. Since you've apparently only 2 IDE devices its quite likely the 2nd channel is not enabled in the BIOS.

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Mike 20 years ago

Ummm...

Some varied advice there...

From what you said last time the mobo is having trouble identifying the drive... you have a DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB drive... these are avaliable in either SATA or ATA133 versions... I'd only bother checking the cable if your's is the ATA133, but do make sure that if you swap the cable for another one that one end of the cable has a blue plastic connector... cause if it doesn't it won't be able to transfer data at the full 133... it will only manage 100 which will cause problems.

Other than that I'd start trying out maxtor's drive utilities... download them from

formatting link

As for slowing down the bootup time... I seriously doubt that will make any difference, but there should be a setting in the BIOS to delay the HDD start-up time, you could try that.

Mike.

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