PC Boot Problems

D

Dijonase

Gawd
Joined
Jun 4, 2004
Messages
946
I've been having issues with an old PC, one that I built several years ago for my parents. In the last few weeks, the following has happened:

  • First, the PC decided to stop powering up all together, which I easily diagnosed as a dead power supply.
  • Then I found that the hard drive was infested with all sorts of viruses, trojans, and other assorted nasties. I reinstalled Windows XP.
  • Now, Windows doesn't want to boot. When I power on, I get the following error: "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER." The PC has a power button and a reset button, and if I hit the reset button when I see the error it boots up correctly. It seems to restart just fine, but when I power it on, not so much.

I'm currently stumped as to what might be going on here. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
I'm thinking maybe it's a boot sector virus and it's eaten at your MBR. Did you reinstal XP or did you format your drive? They're two different things. One installs over another installation, the other one wipes out the entire drive and starts from scratch.

Boot up your computer with your XP CD in it, hit any key when it says "Hit any key to boot from disk..." After the blue screen is done loading what it needs to, go into recovery console and type in "FDISK /MBR" This in turn will restore your master boot record if there is in fact anything wrong with it to begin with.

Might I warn you if you're dual booting with this option and you have GRUB (A linux boot loader) that doing this option will over-write it and you will have to do manual adjustments to your boot.ini file to restore the options of choosing your OS after your POST.

Give that a shot and reply back to the boards to let us know if it worked.

Cheers,
Maplewalnut
 
See if your BIOS has a hard drive spin up delay. There is a possibility that your drive simply isn't up to speed when the boot strap tries to load the OS. Adding a 5 second delay could provide the additional time your drive requires to spin up and resolve your cold boot problem.
 
Thanks for the replies, both. I'll check on both of those things and then reply back, hopefully in the next day or two.
 
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