I am trying someone else's machine (P4 1.5ghZ 384 MB RAM, Zip drive etc)I may buy it because he's selling it for $200 and I need a 2d PC for research and surfing. I get this message at start up "disk boot failure insert system disk and press enter. I just press CTRL ALT DEL and Win 2000 starts up then no further problems. Any idea how to fix that start up error and could this be a serious problem?
Do a Google search. Just type in: disk boot failure insert system disk and press enter It pulled up a lot of information. www.google.com
Since this ET website deals with stock market odds, I'd say that the hardware has about an 80 percent chance of being OK. I'd also rank the operating system software as having about an 80 percent chance of being at fault and in need of re-installing. This based on the fact you can finally get it up and running. agpilot Ps: This also lets me test a first post.
I'm no IT guy but this is what I'd do. The easiest thing is reformat the hard disk and re install Windows. That'll take care of most of your problems. If there is a problem with the hd then you'll need to buy a new one and plug it in. They're really cheap now. If for some reason you don't want to reformat then you could try just sticking a second version of windows (ie split disk) on the system. Good luck
First thing - check your system setup settings (usually F1 durning bootup) and make sure the computer is set to boot from the C: drive first. It sounds like it may be set to boot from a floppy drive. Also, the fact that it works on the second attempt may indicate that one of your two FAT tables for drive C: is corrupt (they alternate). In that case, you might want to backup the drive then reformat it and then restore the files. You will need to use a system recovery backup to make sure all the windows settings are restored. Or, it could indicate that the hard drive is about to fail. Backup any data and if it gets worse, expect to need a new hard drive.
Thanks a lot for all your replies. I should maybe mention that the HD had just been reformated and Win2K installed after a test of XP Pro caused problems such as 100%CPU usage, freezes etc, in addition to the boot disk failure at start up. Would reformating again change anything? Laugh if you want but I never reformated, installed or uninstalled an OS, have no clue how to do it, I just know it smells trouble. The fellow I got the computer from spent his time installing and uninstalling stuff, I never tinker with my machines, and rarely have any serious problem. I might as well leave that one like it is, wait and see what happens. Can it get any worse?
If you have the Win2000 CD, try booting from the CD, then run the repair program. You can boot from the CD by pressing the F8 key at start-up, and selecting the CD boot option. If you do this, run the repair process twice. The first time, I have found the repair program checks the disk ala scandisk. The second time it does that and looks at the files as well. Good luck.
Just wanted to add that the disk boot failure message appears after the message : booting from ATAPI cd-rom. Also it appears C drive is not primary master, floppy disk is I think, BIOS list floppy, CD ROM then HD if I am not mistaken. Strangely enough last time I turned the PC on I didn't get any error message. Maybe it went away by itself, I hope so ... let's just wait and hope ahaha
OK, what you need to do is go into the BIOS setup upon start-up. Do this by press DEL key when machine starts up. Highlight and go to Advanced Setup. You should see a listing for 1st. Boot Device, 2nd Boot Device, etc. Change the 1st. Boot Device entry to IDE-0. Use the + - keys on the key pad to rotate through the various choices and stop at IDE-0. After that look to see that the 2nd Boot Device is the floppy. Change if necessary. When your finished. Press the F10 key to save your changes, then exit. Re-boot with these changes. Computer should now boot from the hard drive, and not the CD-ROM drive.