"Disk Boot Failure" - I don't understand! :(

[meatfestival]

Vista x64 has been working flawlessly for me until recently - I had to hard reset my PC when it became unresponsive after trying to restart. Upon restarting I got "DISK BOOT FAILURE - INSERT SYSTEM DISK" which I haven't seen in years.

I booted up the Vista CD to do a repair, but it found no problems preventing Windows from starting.

This is the weird thing! When I have my BIOS set to boot from CD and I have a bootable CD in the drive, if I choose not to boot the CD, it will continue and load Windows no problem! Otherwise I get the error.

Any suggestions? I can live with leaving a disc in the drive, but it still irks me. I've run chkdsk as well.

 

[Picosaurus]

hmmm, I had the same problem for a time and it turned out my hard drive had become unplugged

 

[Stoly]

I had the same problem, instead of repair, select a restore point.

 

[Headbust]

i know tons about PC's and this is one thing that got me stumped even, i built a system for someone and a windows update was downloaded a couple weeks later, they rebooted there PC and they got that same message, I could not get into safe mode or anything, vista disk did nothing at all as far as repairing(would not even finish) and restore points could not even be selected.

After trying to boot into safe mode millions of times i noticed it would stop as CRCDISK im pretty sure it was called, and I googled that and tons of people have gotten it after a certain windows update and the only way to solve it is to reinstall again.

 

[Volcanon]

Do a chkdisk and fixboot in the recovery console to make sure your boot sector and mbr are okay.

 

[Python]

Another vote for what Volcanon said. I have fixed many a Vista PC doing that.

Also, is your boot drive SATA or IDE?

 

[meatfestival]

I'll try that. My boot drive is SATA.

 

[st0ne]

I just had this issue. The problem for me was that i installed vista with two hard drives hooked up. Vista likes to install the boot file on the 'other' drive your not directly installing to. So when you go to boot up, it asks for the disk.

For me, i downloaded easyBSD and vistabootPRO but neither worked, even using the repair option to restore the boot file to the proper drive. The only way i was able to fix the issue was unplugging my storage drive, and installing windows - then plugging it in after install.