Boot Disk Failure

[imhungry]

I have a Gigabyte P35-DS3L and an E2160 along with 2x1GB Crucial Ballistix RAM, a Thermaltake PSU, and a C2D E2160.

After reformatting the 250GB IDE WD hard drive, I boot through the CD drive and setup windows to a 30GB partition. After that the system auto reboots and then boots back into the Windows setup [text again, not GUI]. If I boot to HDD first it will bypass that and just try to go straight back to the CD drive. And if there's no CD, I get the error BOOT DISK FAILURE, ENTER DISK DRIVE.


Any idea what the problem could be? Thanks.

 

[Billb2]

What is set as the boor device in the BIOS?

 

[imhungry]

1) Floppy
2) Hard Drive [IDE Channel 4 Master]
3) CD drive [IDE Channel 4 Slave]

 

[Blunc]

sometimes in the bios you have to set the hard drive parameter to "large"

 

[imhungry]

Tried setting the hard drive parameter to large and it still booted itself into CD drive. Tried another hard drive and it did the same thing.. so it's not the hard drive.

 

[imhungry]

no ideas?

 

[bruceb]

Did you leave the CD in the CD drive ? ? ?

Also see below: (from this link): http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm


Possible Fix by reconfiguring boot.ini using Recovery Console.

1.Boot with XP CD or 6 floppy boot disk set.

2. Press R to load the Recovery Console.

3. Type bootcfg.

4. This should fix any boot.ini errors causing setup not to see the XP OS
install.

5. Try the repair install.

One more suggestion from MVP Alex Nichol

"Reboot, this time taking the immediate R option and if the CD letter is say K: give these commands

copy K:\i386\ntldr C:
copy K:\i386\ntdetect.com C:


(two other files needed - just in case)

1. Type: attrib -h -r -s C:\boot.ini del C:\boot.ini

2. Type: BootCfg /Rebuild

which will get rid of any damaged boot.ini, search the disk for systems and make a new one. This might even result in a damaged windows reappearing; but gives another chance of getting at the repair"

Try the link below if the repair option is not available.

Windows XP Crashed?

 

[imhungry]

That's the thing. This is a new build and a clean new install of Windows. I'll try the above, though.

 

[imhungry]

Well now the problem seems to be with the motherboard... a problem with the BIOS controller? It refuses to boot into the primary hard drive, no matter what. Even with an external CD-RW drive through USB, it tries to boot into a CD and won't boot with the hard drive.

 

[blunc1]

this may sound a bit basic but you didn't mention it in the OP, has the primary partition on the hard drive been made active?

 

[lucky9]

Have you done a fixmbr yet?

 

[robisbell]

proper boot order

Optical Drive
Hard Drive
Floppy or USB Device

 

[RebateMonger]

Are you using the standard Windows XP install routine (part of the Install process) to partition and format the hard drive, or some other method?

Is the hard drive SATA or IDE? If SATA, what mode is the SATA drive controller set to? AHCI or IDE Compatibility mode?

If AHCI, did you leave the floppy SATA driver disk in the floppy drive until Windows asked you to remove it? The SATA drivers aren't written to the Windows install until the very end of the Text-based install portion.

 

[imhungry]

The hard drive is IDE and I used the standard Windows XP Professional install routine to do everything. And it's definitely not the boot order, I've tried everything. I may go out to buy a SATA 300 drive and see if the IDE controller is the problem..

What's a fixmbr?

 

[Artician]

I am having this exact same issue, and I'm desperate for some answers. My PC has been functioning fine for several years, yet this weekend I flipped it on and got the DISK BOOT FAILURE message.
I reformatted my windows hard drive, and everything went fine. I was able to boot into the new windows install once. However after rebooting a second time, the message came back: DISK BOOT FAILURE.
I have had this issue before where the MBR just became corrupt for some reason. I assumed I had a complete hard drive failure so I went out and bought a new HDD yesterday. I came back home, installed it, installed Windows, everything was fine as before. This morning I get up: DISK BOOT FAILURE. Brand new drive.
My only guess is that this is a motherboard issue, but I've never encountered this before so if anyone has any ideas I would greatly appreciate it. This is really wrecking me and my schedule.
Thanks in advance for any help...