Weird refusal to boot

[Ron Hirsch]

I had a very strange situation develop this am. I'm running a machine I
built last year, and it has been solid in its performance.


The key elements which might be involved here are

Four 400 GB WD SATA drives
2048 MB of RAM
Two Plextor PX-716A 16X dual layer DVD drives
Asus A8N-SLI mobo
Windows XP Pro - latest SP, and all current patches

When I tried to boot up, the boot failed, with the message

"Disk boot failure - insert system disk"

I retried several times, and the same message appeared. The boot order I set
up in the BIOS is for one optical drive which is my "H" drive first, Hard
Drive next, and removable drive, which is my floppy drive 3rd, with the 4th
choice disabled.

I booted up via my Knoppix CD, to look things over, and all the hard drives
were displayed, in apparent good working order.

So, I assumed that some "catastrophe" had occurred on my C drive, involving
the OS files.

I then booted up via my Acronis True Image CD, and restored a recent image
of my C drive, from the F drive, which is one of the storage places I use
for such images.

Shortly after, the restoration was completed, and I dismissed True Image,
and the system then booted up. All then seemed well.

To check things out, I then shut down, and rebooted, with nothing in the CD
drives. The machine again came up with a message stating "Disk boot
failure - insert system disk".

In the course of trying to find out what was going on, I reinserted the True
Image CD. When the program loads, and displayed, three choices are offered -
load the full version, load the safe version (no USB), load Windows. I chose
the latter, and Windows booted up normally, with no glitches of any kind.
This seemed to tell me that the problem was related to the boot process not
finding my C drive, where the OS is located. Apparently when True Image
finished, it gave the system "proper instructions" where to go to then boot
up.

I went into "disk management", and all the drives showed there, as healthy.

So I started a boot up again, and went into the BIOS. All four 400 GB drives
show there. But, when I went to the window that listed all the boot choices,
there were only three 400 GB drives listed, along with the optical drives et
al. So, what seems to have happened somehow, is that one of the SATA drives
is now not listed there, and it would seem that it may very well be the C:\
drive.

In the BIOS, there doesn't appear to be any way to tell which drive is
which. The text names I gave to them don't show there. How do I get the
missing hard drive to be shown in the boot list? It shows everywhere else. I
also see no way to identify the drives, to resolve this problem and
determine which drive is which.

In the future, I will definitely make the System drive a different size from
the others, which will allow it to be more readily identified.

Here are a few pieces of added info, in case they might be important.

Historically, the C (system) drive was usually drive 0. But in my system,
Windows did not assign that ID in the disk management window.

The drives in my system are numbered as follows

Drive C = 2
Drive D = 0
Drive E = 1
Drive F = 3

This is how they got numbered when I built the system. And they have all
worked well for 18 months since then.

Can anyone explain to me what's going on please, and how to remedy the
problem.

Ron Hirsch

 

[Dee]

Hi Ron...
This message usually tells you that:
the necessary boot files on your hard drive are missing or corrupted.

The typical suggestions for this are to boot from windows xp disk and
reformat the hard drive.

sounds drastic, but this seems to be the general concesus.
Post back...
Dee

 

[Unknown]

Normally the floppy is always first and is identified as A or B. Why is
yours 3rd?

 

[DL]

You might want to download & create the WD HD checking utility floppy or cd

PS when you have multiple hd's, cd/dvds, readers etc its often best to
initially set up your sys with only a single hd & cd connected that way
avoids 'odd' hd designations letters.
PPS key elements should also include your power supply, a marginal pwr
supply can produce all manor of weird probs

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Normally the floppy is always first and is identified as A or B. Why is
yours 3rd?

My view is that neither the floppy drive nor the CD drive should be
kept as first in the boot order.

Boot sector viruses aren't as common as they used to be, but they are
still around. If the floppy is set to boot first, and you happen to
have left a floppy in the drive, and that floppy happens to have a
boot sector virus on it, you're infected.

The risk may be small, but there's no reason to run it at all. The
hard drive should be kept as the first boot device, and it should be
changed to another device *only* when you need it.

 

[Unknown]

Your view may be 100% correct, however, there is no way to determine what
the intent of the BIOS programmer had in mind when it was created without a
program listing for each manufacturer. I do know however the original BIOS
on the first PCs expected a floppy to be read first. Therefore, I will keep
mine as first boot device. As to leaving a floppy in the drive, and then
trying to boot up, it has ALWAYS stopped and gave me information before
damaging anything. I ALWAYS get an option on what to do.