DISK BOOT FAILURE!

paulsheff

paulsheff

paulsheff

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Joined
16 May 2005
Posts
680
Oh heck...

PC hung on blue scrolling bar, disk activity but going nowhere. Reset and I got the message Boot from CD: DISK BOOT FAILED INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND HIT ENTER.

Switched off, took the hard drive out, blew on it a bit... Plugged it back in and switched on and got safe mode option so chose that. Managed to backup everything important, restarted, and it's fine...

So I've donned a clean pair of underwear, and come in search of help. I've got RAID on this board but no idea how to use it.

If I stuck in a new HD the same size as my current one can I just say Raid 0 (is that that right for mirroring?) and copy everything that is on there at the minute and let me know if one of them goes **** up?

Am I best of using something like Acronis?

I have an 80GB SATA (see sig) that isn't and hasn't ever been plugged in!?! Will it need formatting first b4 windows can use/see it? I've stuck everything important on a USB stick but want to copy everything from the 300GB cos it will easily fit on the 80GB while I sort out a second 300GB drive.

Oh I've been a fool... A crazy sexy fool, I need some help, show me the light of backing up properly.
 
I'm no expert but I would prefer to use Acronis. About you other problem you should be able to plug the SATA in and windows (hopefully) should see it.

Regards,
Jamie.
 
Windows will see the drive during setup and give you the oportunity to format it as you see fit.

As for backing up you are probably best having a separate HDD and some automated software that will copy over important folders. I use a Microsoft XP PowerToy called SyncToy for this.

You could go the RAID route but sounds like far too much effort to me lol.

SiriusB
 
I think it's F-Secure that's being a pain in the bum. I just upgraded to 2006 yesterday. Bizarrely if I shut down completely, it won't boot, but then safe mode>restart comes back fine.

Well weird, may restore to the day before F-Secure install and see if that helps.
 
A restore to the middle of the F-Secure install seems to have helped. I shutdown and restarted fine.

What a mess, might ditch F-Secure for NOD32. I don't know what it is with Antivirus, I get a year of good service out of it, McAfee, Panda, F-Secure and then suddenly it inadvertantly decides to slap me up the side of the head!

I'll stick the second drive in and see what XP makes of it. Cheers for the advice guys.
 
Second drive in, I just initialise it in Disk Management yeah?

Will it stick it's own drive letter on it and if I remove it at any point will XP throw a wobbly becuase it's not there?
 
No, you be able to remove it just fine as long as you have another bootable drive plugged in there.

Yeah it will give its own drive letter, the next free one in the alphabet. Most proberly E: or F: so long you dont have any others. ie. virtual drives. Then again you can always change it if you really want to from control panel.

Regards,
Jamie. :D
 
RAID 1 is mirroring. From what I understand from your post your current disk is on the blink? Thus making ghosting or creating a raid1 array rather risky as you will inherit and copy the bad data over.

Get a nice backup which is completely seperate from your machine then pop the new drive in and reinstall.

You could try using norton ghost or something and see how it works but you never know when your hard disk might just throw its lunch up with the bad data on it.
 
Hi guys

Cheers for the input.

Jon - I thought it was the disk initially, but after a few startups and shutdowns without any issues I think it was definitely to do with the install of F-Secure. It was getting to the same point of startup and failing and hitting the reset button obviously wasn't clearing things out properly hence it saying it couldn't boot from the HD, but then was ok in Safemode where F-Secure didn't load.

When I installed F-Secure the first time there was an error in the event viewer relating to a dll that hasn't been repeated with the second attempt at the installation, so I'm hoping all is well. Everything is backed up ok manually, just need to setup some software to backup certain folders periodically.

I should have been a tree surgeon.
 
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I strongly recommend CyberLink PowerBackup.

As soon as I tried it, I liked it. It's simple to use, I can select exactly what I want to backup, I can apply compression and a password to the backup, and I can make a small executable on the backup drive, to save reinstalling PowerBackup should I need to restore anything.
 
The only use for a suspected faulty HD is for using as nonessential backups or to be the only drive in a cheap little personal (mp3, web, whatever) server.

A neighbour of mine has got one of my old 60GB Maxtors which died (the clicky-clicky-gronk noise) whilst working as part of a RAID0 set. I worked around it by partitioning only the last 40GB of the drive, leaving the rest blank. Been working for a year now!
 
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