DISK BOOT FAILURE after Bad shutdown

[Glazza]

Yesterday I installed a new C drive, after many shenanigans I got it all to work. There are 2 Hdds on the PC. I shutdown last night and rebooted this morning - no problems. The wife has just been surfing on the net when the PC begun to hang - Cntl/Alt/delete, task manager didn't work so she switched off the PC by holding in the button. When she tries to reboot, a disk boot failure insert system disk message starts to appear. The Hdds were being detected until this forced shutdown! Can anyone tell me what has happened?

 

[bcastner]

Describe "shenanigans." Only a fresh install of XP on the C drive is a suitable shenanigan.

See the following discussion for possible non-OS causes of this error:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hardware/Q_20838027.html

 

[bcastner]

Also, check for a CD in the CD ROM drive. It is possible the BIOS is still set to a boot order: CD ROM, Hard Disk 0, Hard Disk 1, floppy or something other than the hard drive as the first boot device.

 

[Glazza]

Step 1 - Install XP on brand spanking new drive
Step 2 - Using Partition Magic create a smaller drive
Step 3 - Using Drive image XP restored previous C drive image to smaller drive
Step 4 - Copied smaller drive over C-drive using Drive image XP
Step 5 - NUmerous reboots to correct niggling errors

PC was rebooting correctly, detecting both Hdds in correct order. Like I said no problemo until the forced shutdown.
PC had a new power supply , fitted 3 months ago.

Yeh, I know, a lot of shenanigans but I wanted all my setup from the previous c-drive.

 

[bcastner]

It would be worth your while download the drive manufacturer's diagnostic software and testing the new drive. Any failure of a new device suggests the possibility that the device has a manufacturing defect.

 

[Glazza]

Thanks for all contributions. I opened up the PC again last night and swapped the connectors on the IDE ribbon into the other drives and magically it worked ok. So obviously HDDs can be detected if the connectors are in the wrong sockets but once you don't shutdown correctly it loses the info.

THanks again anyway