DISK BOOT FAILURE

[Guest]

I had a nasty registry bug and finally got it fixed after days of
frustration. All worked fine. Today I walked in to find it froze in the
dormant state. Nothing I tried, including some blood curdling yelling, got it
out of the freeze. When I tired to reboot the machine the nightmare started.
All I get now is BOOT DISK FAILURE, bla bla bla... when I insert the system
disk its not being read. I still get BOOT DISK FAILURE. It is a full licensed
XP Pro but does not seem to be read on reboot. Can not get to F8 set CD as
first boot drive. Did F4 to see if it would see the CD drive to no avail.

Soooo..... I tried to go back to 98 but that would not reinstall because it
could not find I had it on the drive originally. So now it has a format for
98 and I can not get anywhere with XP. No matter what I've tried I get the
boot disk failure.

Can not seem to find anything in the knowledge base.

Why do I feel like the WINDOWS is half way up my butt and no longer on my
PC? Maybe bill could use a few billion to send personal helpers to us all to
help pull us out of the occasional nightmares of falling through a window
into the bottomless unknown.

Any help appreciated... Jay

 

[RonK]

Sounds like your hard drive might have failed. Does bios see the hard drive
?

 

[Guest]

It sees the drives OK. I also put a new clean drive in and still can not
install XP. I stil get boot failuer message which confuses me since this is a
totaly clean new drive.

 

[RonK]

Does the computer boot to the XP cd when you try to install ?

 

[Guest]

No.. so I downloaded the 6 disk set to boot off a drive. Get all 6 loaded but
whenI hit enter to run the CD it keep telling me to put the Cd in the drive
and hit enter. When I f3 to quit it reboots to set up screen. When I try to
change from c to F the CD drive, no go. Nor will it go to A drive now. I took
thgis drive and loaded XPpro from another machine and it runs on that
machine. But took it back to this machine and it says invalid disk.

At this point I decided to be smart. I gave my sledge hammer to a neighbor
to hold!<G>

 

[Guest]

Did you download the correct 6 disk set for your version of XP? There are 2 different sets (home or pro) for each version of XP, XP with SP1 and XP with SP2. See http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310994&Product=winxp.

--
Just my 2¢ worth,
Jeff
__________in response to__________
| No.. so I downloaded the 6 disk set to boot off a drive. Get all 6 loaded but
| whenI hit enter to run the CD it keep telling me to put the Cd in the drive
| and hit enter. When I f3 to quit it reboots to set up screen. When I try to
| change from c to F the CD drive, no go. Nor will it go to A drive now. I took
| thgis drive and loaded XPpro from another machine and it runs on that
| machine. But took it back to this machine and it says invalid disk.
|
| At this point I decided to be smart. I gave my sledge hammer to a neighbor
| to hold!<G>

 

[RonK]

You should Clear your bios with the jumper and start totally fresh. Make
sure you unpluig the power cord when clearing the bios.

After you have done that go into bios and set the date. In Standard
Settings - Set the ide to AUTO.

Set your boot sequence to CDROM, IDE-0.
Have your XP cd in the drive and boot the computer. You will have to hit a
key so the cdrom will load.

Install XP.

Hope this works for you. I have run into this before with a few computers
and clearing the bios fixed the problem installing XP.

 

[Guest]

I am not sure how to clear the bios. What jumper do I remove. The jumper on
the HD is set to master. Can I remove the MB battery to clear the bios. I
think I did that last year on one of my machines.

The machie is a refurb and the only documentation was on the HD which is no
longer the case since it was reformatted and reloaded with xp pro.

 

[RonK]

There should be a jumper on a 3 pin connection close to the battery. You
can remove the battery but unplug the power cord from the wall. Let it sit
for about 10 minutes with the battery removed.