disk boot failure

[bygracealne]

I have a home grown old pc running win 2000 pro sp 4. Intermittently,
I get a disk boot failure message. I originally thought it was
occuring only after short blackouts (2 seconds or so) and that the
power supply was not coming up correctly. I thought this because hard
- rebooting the pc would correct the issue. In order to fix that
problem I have purchased and installed a ups. The other day however
the problem occurred again. The ups showed NO power issues at the
time. The symptoms are that simply soft rebooting the PC bios shows
NO drives connected to the primary controller during selftest. The
current config is master and slave hard drives on primary controller.
Cdrom drive is master on Secondary controller. I have checked the
primary drive using full checkdsk on reboot. It took several hours to
run and reported NO problems with the drive. Do you think this is a
drive issue, motherboard issue, power supply problem? What do you
recommend that I test? Has anyone had this problem before?

 

[Arno Wagner]

I have a home grown old pc running win 2000 pro sp 4. Intermittently,
I get a disk boot failure message. I originally thought it was
occuring only after short blackouts (2 seconds or so) and that the
power supply was not coming up correctly. I thought this because hard
- rebooting the pc would correct the issue. In order to fix that
problem I have purchased and installed a ups. The other day however
the problem occurred again. The ups showed NO power issues at the
time. The symptoms are that simply soft rebooting the PC bios shows
NO drives connected to the primary controller during selftest. The
current config is master and slave hard drives on primary controller.
Cdrom drive is master on Secondary controller. I have checked the
primary drive using full checkdsk on reboot. It took several hours to
run and reported NO problems with the drive. Do you think this is a
drive issue, motherboard issue, power supply problem? What do you
recommend that I test? Has anyone had this problem before?

Sounds very much like a PSU issue, especially in an old machine.
Just to be sure you can pit the SMART status of the disk here.
Get it, e.g., with smartctl or some other SMART monitor tool.

Arno

 

[Rod Speed]

I have a home grown old pc running win 2000 pro sp 4. Intermittently,
I get a disk boot failure message. I originally thought it was
occuring only after short blackouts (2 seconds or so) and that the
power supply was not coming up correctly. I thought this because hard
- rebooting the pc would correct the issue.

Thats usually because the power glitch leaves the system in a funny state.

In order to fix that problem I have purchased and installed a ups. The other
day however the problem occurred again. The ups showed NO power issues
at the time. The symptoms are that simply soft rebooting the PC bios shows
NO drives connected to the primary controller during selftest.

The current config is master and slave hard drives on primary controller.
Cdrom drive is master on Secondary controller. I have checked the
primary drive using full checkdsk on reboot. It took several hours to run

Thats a hell of a long time for that.

and reported NO problems with the drive. Do you think this
is a drive issue, motherboard issue, power supply problem?

Could be any of those. Less likely to be the hard drive tho.

What do you recommend that I test?

I'd check the motherboard for bad caps. These are the usually blue
or black plastic covered post like things that stick up vertically from
the motherboard surface. The tops should be flat. Any that have
bulged or have visibly leaked could well be the problem.

However, swapping the power supply is easier to do than anything
else and can be worth trying if you are otherwise fresh out of ideas.

Has anyone had this problem before?

Yep.

 

[bygracealne]

Sounds very much like a PSU issue, especially in an old machine.
Just to be sure you can pit the SMART status of the disk here.
Get it, e.g., with smartctl or some other SMART monitor tool.

Arno- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Arno, Thanks for the advice. Any recommendation on a smart drive tool
to use?

Paul

 

[Arno Wagner]

Arno, Thanks for the advice. Any recommendation on a smart drive tool
to use?

I use smartctl from the smartmontools (->Google). Commandline-only,
but has good text-output. Speedfan gives you also a good overview,
but I was unable to get it to write SMART attributes to file.
Maybe I just did not look long enough. Some people here like
Everest, which I have not tried so far. Maybe start with that.

Arno