No Boot Disk

[ThinkerThinker]

I have this strange problem and I don't know what is causing it.

My machine would not start up but instead display a message that the Boot Disk could not be found. However, I would re-try and on about the fifth time it did start up. But once Windows has loaded etc. I could not access MS Word and some toehr programs but I could get onto the Internet and use my mail. This has been going on for two weeks now. Because it sometimes start up and sometimes not I don't know if it is hardware or software?

 

[edfair]

Without performing diagnostics there is no certainty, but it sounds like you hard drive may be starting to fail. Or the hard drive controller. Or the cable.
How about downloading the diagnostics from the hard drive manufacturer and running a test.
A normally reliable system that starts these types of bahavior indicates that something has gone wrong. Usually hardware, since software usually is a solid failure, although some of the windows stuff does exibit flaky behavior.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[hopelessliar]

Have you looked in the BIOS to make sure the hard drive is being detected? That's where I'd start...

Report back here what you can see in the BIOS.

 

[oisnds]

I think you should replace the CMOS battery on the main board. Your BIOS settings may not be holding, and it's a cheap fix.

 

[Larena]

I had a similar problem and read somewhere that SATA drives take longer to spin up than IDE drives, so sometimes (about every 2nd boot) the BIOS would detect my IDE (secondary) but not the SATA (boot) HDD.

If your drive is SATA, try turning off Fast POST in the BIOS - that fixed it for me, because the4 drive now has time to spin up.

 

[jurgen36]

Try to give a delay of 5 seconds to your hard drives. You should be able to do this in the bios. Its possible that the drives are on the way out. Run scandisk. Regards

Jurgen

 

[ThinkerThinker]

Thanks for all the advice

I tried Norton Ghost but got bad sectors. I think the drive is on it's way out. I'm just going to get all the info I can over to the new drive and take it to some data recovery people to look the drive over

 

[josefs]

Try to boot from the Recovery Console and enter at the C>-prompt "chkdsk /r".
Josef