Boot disk failure/primary master fails

[mrf0979]

OK, I just built a brand new computer with all new components. On the very first power-up, after the splash screens and the POST, the very last thing output was "BOOT DISK FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER" I'm not much of an expert when it comes to building a computer from the ground up, so I had my very competent friend with me to help. He didn't seem phased by this message, so I neither was I. In the BIOS setup, My hard drive was detected when I chose 'auto' under primary master, thus solidifying my confidence that everything was OK.

So I install Windows XP today and when I reboot, instead of XP starting up like I expect, I get the same message as before about boot disk failure. Then I check in the BIOS setup screen, and suddenly my hard drive is no longer being detected. So I call up my friend and we spend too long enabling and disabling different things in the setup, every time the same result, BOOT DISK FAILURE. Sometimes setup would detect the hard drive, other times it would not under the same exact settings.

So my main question is this: Was my new hard drive bad to begin with?

In case this info helps, I have an ASUS a7v8x motherboard with an Athlon XP 2200+ processor and an 80 GB Western Digital hard drive, and I am not using RAID.

Anyone have ideas?

 

[TheGrey]

Probably a dead harddrive, but check the jumper settings.
A standalone WD disk should be without any jumper straps.
A master should only go together with a slave.
Some bioses manages to boot from the disk even with wrong jumper settings, but the autodetect takes "forever",and errors like those you explain could occur.

This is ofcourse only my thoughts based on my experiences, not necessarily a solution for your problem.

 

[30051978]

Hi
plz check out the boot sequenc in bois it shoud be hard disk first then as per u"r req. if still it not help u out
then u'r MBR is no avalable inu'r hdd boot u'r pc from bootable flopy and gave command the " fdisk/mbr"

 

[wolluf]

Have you (or your expert friend) access to another machine you could try your drive in? Your problem may be a faulty hard drive, but it may also be faulty hardware elsewhere. If your drive is consistently (boot it at least 6 or 7 times) detected and accessible in another machine - that points to other component(s). If not, take the drive back to supplier.

If its not the drive, then normal/best approach is elimination - your expert friend should be able to help there (basically trying to isolate which component is causing problem - eg, memory, card (graphics, sound, network, modem), drive (CD, DVD), cpu, psu, mobo (eg, IDE controller))

 

[mrf0979]

Hey everyone, thanks for the speedy replies! The first thing we tried yesterday was jumper settings, but we never tried 'no jumper'. That did the trick! At first I had a blank screen for about a minute and I was just about to reboot and XP started up. I'm glad it was so simple to fix. I was not looking forward to dismantling my computer.

Thanks as well for being so helpful to a newbie at this! Sometimes it's the smallest solutions we overlook.