Hard disk boot failure / bios problem?

[ironchef05]

I have been receiving the message “Disk Boot Failure, Insert System disk and press enter” for about two days now. I recently tried to add a PCI graphics card to my machine (I already have an agp card). The new card was found, and the drivers were all installed happily. I was playing around with the display settings to get something I was happy with. I tried to open the settings utility for my AGP card, an SIS chipset thing, and the computer restarted. I then started getting the disk boot failure message.

I have two hard drives and two cd-roms on my computer, all IDE. The C: drive (master) has started making noise when it first powers on. The noise sounds similar to the noise you get when a wire is hitting your CPU fan.

The first thing I did was take the drive to the IT person at my work. He checked it out, said it appeared to be fine. The drive was not making “the noise”, and by connecting it as an external drive I was able to open it up and backup some files.

I took the drive home, and plugged it back in. Disk Boot Failure. I tried resetting the CMOS by moving the jumper by the motherboard batter. Disk Boot Failure. I have tried switching cables, switching which IDE bus the drive goes into. I have tried playing with the BIOS settings. I have tried booting the machine up with only the hard drive, floppy, RAM, and agp video card. I have come to a few conclusions.

The cable is not the problem.
No combination of disconnecting, reconnecting, setting as slave, master, and adjusting the jumper has helped.
If I put in a DOS startup disk, the computer will start up with that, but is unable to find any drives (c:, d.
If I put in my system restore CD in the CDROM, that runs, but says no hard drives are connected.
On the BIOS startup screen, it recognizes my drives. On the BIOS Setup screen, it does not recognize my C: drive, the one that makes the funny noise. To clarify: on the screen where it detects what’s connected: “Detecting Primary Master… Maxtor 51536U3” “Press F1 to enter SETUP”
When I press F1: “Primary Master ” when I connect the other hard drive as the master, I get its ID in both the startup BIOS screen and the setup BIOS screen.
When booting with the other hard drive as master, I still get the message "disk boot failure".

I am out of ideas.

 

[ski]

A clicking noise from a HD is not a good sign.
I recently replaced a clicking HD that worked ok for a while before completely failing.
You did a good thing be backing up critical files on another system.

Did you try booting from it with it connected as Master on the IDE 2 controller, and no other drives connected?

If that works, then the IDE 1 controller may be either disabled in BIOS, or the controller is bad.
If it does not work, then the drive is probably bad.

 

[ironchef05]

I have tried booting with the drive set as master on both IDE controllers, with no drives present, and with varying numbers of the other drives present. I am fairly certain that the hard drive isn't broken. The noise it makes isn't so much a clicking noise as a "rapidly reading data sound". It does not make that noise when the drive is connected to another system.

I have tried flashing the BIOS. I have an HP Pavilion 8700 system# D7204D. I used Pavilion Pegasus BIOS Update V. 2.02 from

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...s=20&product=59300&cc=us&softwareitem=pv470en

the update went fine (or so it said), but did not change the disk boot failure error.

 

[ski]

Connect a different power cable to the drive, if you've not already done so.

If no luck or that's already been done, then it's possible that the drive's MBR and/or partition table may be corrupt.
If you have backed up all critical files, then see if you can repartition and reformat the drive.

 

[ironchef05]

Thank you for all the advice so far. Unfortunaltely, I'm still not making any progress. Changing the power connection doesn't do anything. I tried running fdisk, but it says no hard disk is found (unless the slave hard drive is connected, in which case it only finds that one).

I really think there is something wrong with the intilization of the hard drive (do they do that?) or the system BIOS. Only the maxtor hard drive makes the funny noise on start up, for about 1 sec, and only does it on my system. It worked fine as a secondary drive on another system. The other hard drive does not make a noise, as a slave, as master, as anything. BIOS finds the maxtor drive (the POST screen?) but when I enter setup, it no longer recognizes the maxtor drive.

 

[iamthecheese]

That sounds really strange. A useful hard drive utility I found is hdat2 from

http://www.hdat2.com.

It lets you look at lots of the settings and properties of the drive. If it can detect the hard drive maybe it can give some insight into what the problem is.

It's just strange that the drive seems to be fine on a different system. If you just updated your BIOS you wouldn't think that should be causing problem either.

If it works fine on a second system, I'd copy everything off it and do what ski said--wipe the whole drive, reformat, etc and start from scratch.

Good luck.

 

[micker377]

Have you tried putting in the "D" drive as master? It won't boot, but see if BIOS "autodetect" sees a drive there. If not, it may be an IDE port problem. In this case, you could use an IDE plug-in card.

 

[garebo]

Whatever the mfgr is you can go to their website and download tools to test that hard drive.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[ironchef05]

Sorry for the delay, I've been trying numerous things, and so far nothing has worked. I think the problem is with the Master Boot Record. By using the hdat2 program recommended above, I compared my MBR to the one shown at

http://www.ntfs.com/mbr-damaged.htm

looking at the first three rows, everything is the same (I didn't feel like comparing the whole thing). I have been unable to run win xp recovery console or fdisk, neither program will find my disk. I would like to try re-writing my MBR, but I can't find a program that will do that AND acknowledge the existence of the drive.

Some other things of note: using HDAT2, checking device informaiton, the Mard disk parameter table INT41/46h at F000:EF6F h

there is an error for the "control byte". it is 00B0 (hex), error says it should be 0. Don't really know what that means.

When using the hard drive tools from maxtor, i can erase everything, but do nothing about fixing the MBR. when i scan , i'm told that BIOS extension support has failed, but that the drive has passed the test and is working.

Based on what programs recognize and don't recognize the drive, I think something on the drive allows very low level programs (the maxtor utility, hdat2) to find it, but not more fancy programs like fdisk (not that fdisk is that fancy).

 

[jurgen36]

You can fill the drive with 0's using the Maxtor utility. Then fdisk the drive and reformat, this should fix your problems. But you will loose all info on the drive. Regards

Jurgen