How to boot from HDD?

[zaragos124]

Hello good people, I was trying to back up data using Norton Ghost but my desktop won't boot after prompt from Ghost to restart PC. The monitor goes blank and black with error message " boot failure". My OS is WinXP Home Edition actually upgraded from Windows Me to Win XP HE with SP2 installed after. PC has been working extremely well until now. The HDD is Hitachi 60 GB capacity and motherboard is Saturn-Phoenix ATX form-factor MS-6309. I used Windows 98 floppy disk w/fdisk.exe to boot PC but it did not work. I used Symantec Recovery Disk but it was not user friendly; I then downloaded boot disk from manufacturer's web site using another computer and burned it onto a CDROM, changed BIOS to boot from CDROM, Floppy and IDE-3, in that order but won't boot. I am not sure which of the IDE 0-3, I should use to boot from hard disk changing the boot sequence from the BIOS. However, I used the downloaded boot CDROM from Packard Bell site to boot from CDROM it still didn't work. What next can I do to try and solve this problem? Can someone help please?

 

[attrofy]

How exactly did you use FDISK to boot the computer? Please go through the procedure as best as you remember. My guess is you either formatted the HDD, or you erased your boot partition.

If you didn't run FDISK, but only used the floppy to boot up, your BIOS boot order should be Floppy, CD-ROM, IDE 0 and that will Check Floppy drive first, CD-ROM for bootable CD second, then your primary HDD third. I assume you have no other HDD since you didn't mention them. The other IDE's (1-3) are if you have additional HDD installed.

Lastly, the Boot Failure message is most likely because it is not finding an OS to boot to. If you change the boot order as I ndicated above, and BIOS shows all three drives properly, assuming you still can't boot, then insert your Win98 disk again, and when it all starts up, and you get to the A:> prompt - type:
c: <enter>
dir <enter>

If nothing comes up at the C: prompt, there is a hardware issue. If nothing comes up after the DIR command, there is no data on the HDD.