Boot disk failure, please insert system disk and hit enter

G

Guest

Hello:

I am currently running Windows XP service pack 2. Up until today everthing
has been operating just fine.

When I hit the restart button as one of the Turn off Computer options
Windows does shut down and does start to come back. The problem starts when
the system looks for the Primary Master Slave; there is a line of text that
says press F4 to skip. It then says none, finds nothing on the Secondary
Master Slave, and moves on the Cd drive, which it finds. I then get the line:
Boot disk failure, please insert system disk and hit enter.

If I force a shutdown by pressing and holding my power button and then turn
it back on everything comes up fine and I can proceed with business as usual.
The Primary Master Slave shows up as my hard drive.

Does this mean I am looking at a hard drive going bad? I have run chkdsk and
everything came back fine. Device manager shows no issues whatsoever.

Thank you for any assistance you can give.
 
R

R. McCarty

Either the drive itself is not starting properly or the IDE cable may not
be properly seated. In some cases a few drives take longer than others
to reach full spin/power-up. Many BIOS'es have a IDE Delay setting
where you can give the drive a little more time to become fully enabled
before the BIOS scans the channels/taps for devices.
 
N

Newbie Coder

Darren,

Its either Primary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Master, Secondary
Slave...

If your BIOS cannot find Primary Master & you're using an IDE Hard Drive
then it won't find the boot disc (meaning the bootable HDD).

Try to go into the BIOS (pressing F2 or DEL to enter the BIOS) & checking
you can detect the Hard Drive by usually pressing ENTER on the IDE.... Does
it detect? If so, then ok, if not then you probably have a failed Hard Drive
Controller

Another reason you get that error is if someone has left in a Floppy Disc in
the drive when trying to boot & in the BIOS you have Floppy set as a boot
device; Floppy, HDD then CD ROM

I hope this was on help,
 

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