DISK BOOT FAILURE

[AndyMoody]

I've been using the setup as shown in my signature without problems for at least a couple of years. My wife powered up the PC yesterday and it came up with DISK BOOT FAILURE PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK. After a bit of help from friends, one of them suggested I tried one of the SATA cables in a different socket. I tried it in SATA2 socket and it booted up OK. SATA1-4 sockets use NVIDIA, SATA5-8 use Silicon Image which I've been using until this evening.
With both drives connected they are shown in hardware in profile as Primary and Secondary ATA drives. If I try the other drive by itself in the socket this one I now working with I get error beeps or DISK BOOT FAILURE MESSAGE.
Is the drive had it or any other ideas? If the drive is no good, can I replace it with another SATA-II drive of equal or greater size?

Thanks.

 

[khushy]

tut tut - typical . . .

women drivers - they have a great deal to answer for?!?!?!?!

"keell them"

khushy

 

[Pandobear]

If I am understanding you correctly you only get the error message when you have a single non system drive connected? If that is the case then that is to be expected. The most common cause of the symtoms you report is a floppy disk left in the floppy drive, but is actually caused by you trying to boot from a non bootable drive. Which drive your system is set to boot from is set in the bios, with your likely to be marked as Nvidia array or SIL / ext scsi.

If you have two hard drives in Raid 1 then they are likely to need to both be on the same controller, unless they are raided via the operating system. The easiest thing to try is move one drive onto each of the controllers, one on Nvidia and one on SI and see if you can boot into Windows, if you can't then reverse them. Once you are in Windows you can examine their respective contents and run scandisk to check for errors.

To answer your second question, if one drive has failed then you shoud be able to add any other drive of equal or greater size to rebuild the array, either via the bios setup, or windows, however when a drive fails the bios raid setup normally shows you an array failure and marks the missing or failed drive in red on the boot screen.