(Impossible) Hard Drive Problem

S

StavrosCO

Geek Trainee
The following is a problem that has taken every idea I could think of and stomped it into failure.

I have a SATA Seagate ST3250823AS 250 GB Hard Drive that for some reason EVERY time I boot my boot process halts on:

DISK BOOT FAILURE: INSERT SYSTEM DISC AND PRESS ENTER

However if I have my Windows XP CD in drive and have the boot order set to check CD-ROM before Hard Disk, all I have to do is wait for it to tell me press any key to boot from CD and without doing anything it continues normally.

Fortunately this isn't a crippling problem, however it is very annoying to need to have my XP cd in my drive for every boot, especially because I'm often moving my computer from college to home, and about for LAN parties.

Here are my system specs:
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Processor @ 2.00Ghz
Some kind of Corsair RAM 2X 512Mb sticks
Seagate ST3250823AS 250 Gb SATA Hard Drive
Maxtor 6L080J4 80 GB IDE Hard Drive
Samsung SP0842N 80 Gb IDE Hard Drive
ASUS A8N Deluxe SLI Motherboard
Nvidia Geforce 6800 GT 256Mb

And here's what I've tried so far:
1.) All motherboard drivers are current
2.) I tried removing the other two hard drives and definitely know the problem is with the SATA drive
3.) I've tried using the Windows Recovery Console to repair the Master Boot Record and rewrite the Boot Sector
4.) I've tried using the chkdsk /r command from Windows Recovery Console
5.) I've tried using the Windows XP scan for Errors Tool
6.) I've tried a clean format of the drive
7.) I've tried two new SATA cables
8.) I've tried all four of the SATA slots on my Motherboard
9.) I read on some other website someone solved this problem by replacing the Motherboard battery, which didn't work for me

So basically I'm at my wits end. Does anyone have any other ideas? Or did my Hard Drive just crap out on me? I've had it for probably 6 months and the problem started only recently but I can't think of anything else to try...

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers!
 
I am not quite sure I understand your problem. Are you saying that booting from CD works fine but booting from hard disk does not?

If that's the case, it sounds as if your boot partition has become corrupt.

Boot your computer using the CD-ROM, choose 'Repair' and go into the Recovery Console. At the command line type:

Code: 
fixmbr

Restart your computer
 
Yes booting normally from the Hard Drive results in the error, but if I have my XP CD in the drive, all it has to do is detect it's there, give me prompt to press any key to boot off of CD, but even if I don't press anything it still boots fine.

Unfortunately I've already tried fixmbr and it didn't work...

I haven't tried resetting the BIOS, I'll try that now
 
StavrosCO said:
Updating my BIOS did the trick!
Click to expand...
np, but a BIOS upgrade is not recomended, a BIOS reset is much safer, cos if anything goes wrong during a BIOS update you will perminently kill your mobo[ot]turn your mobo into a very pretty paperweight[/ot]but glad you fixed it :good:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top