Arghh! I'm assuming the motherboard is bad...

[kmote]

well you will get this error if you have removed all drives except one which does not have an OS installed.
put your optical drive on the end of the IDE cable in your first IDE socket and set the jumper position to master
put your IDE HDD on the other chanel if you have one, if not put it in the middle of the IDE cable and set the jumper position to slave
make sure all cables are in firmly then go into BIOS and check that 1) all drives are detected properly 2) the optical drive appears first in the boot order followed by the IDE HDD 3) if your BIOS has an additional HDD boot order make sure those settings are correct

 

[KuriousJorj]

Okay, I think I've 'tricked' a way to force the new system to recognize the hard drive, and am currently installing WinXP pro on it.

Here's what I did:

When I temporarily put one of my other hard drives (Win 2K Pro) into the new system, they would start up normally. (I usually turned it off before it fully started up, as it obviously isn't configured for this new system/hardware, and I didn't want to get BSD, bad memory blocks, etc., but would run it long enough to show the system recognized the foreign Win 2K drive and would boot)

So anyhow, I took the new, empty WD hard drive, installed it on my old system, installed Win XP Pro on it, then installed it back on the 'new' system... AND IT FINALLY RECOGNIZED THE DRIVE!!!

I was then able to boot from the DVD drive upon restart, and am currently re-installing on this new system.

Wow.

Interesting that the system would only give the "BOOT DISK FAILURE..." error and refused to allow me to format/install the hard drive until it already had something on it (Win XP in this case)

Thanks for the help folks, you certainly helped me narrow down the options and alleviated some anxiety!

 

[KuriousJorj]

well, I'm back...

well, I'm back...

My system has been more or less fine... I was editing/rendering HD video, installing and running programs, and doing some gaming.

My CPU came with "Call of Duty 4" which ran fine (but is far too short, BTW). I also installed and started playing "LOTR: the Battle for Middle-Earth" which would never work before.

Today, as I was playing, the mouse would freeze up, the cursor stuck and not movable. --this has occasionally happened with this old mouse-- However, I love the mouse, has a long cord, many buttons, so I stick with it.

Anyhow, when my game/mouse would freeze, I would usually just do a hard reboot by holding in the power button; I know that's not good for the hard drive, but I didn't feel like looking up keyboard shortcuts to restart.

Well it happened again, and this time, the BIOS didn't see my drive upon startup!!! When I reset, it DID see the drive in the BIOS, but just like before, I'm getting that "BOOT DISK FAILURE..." error!

I tried inserting the WinXP Pro disk to repair the install, but AGAIN, it won't boot off the CD, and just gives me that error!!!

FOR GOD'S SAKES!

Could there be a physical problem with the hd Boot Sector or MBR or whatever it's called?

 

[KuriousJorj]

Well, I just re-started...and it booted into the regular WinXP install... THIS time.

If my drive is questionable, wonder how I could test it? If this is an MBR issue, isn't' there some way of repairing it w/o messing up the OS?

 

[-RockMan-]

It maybe a long shot, but.....
Have your ever thought that the CD might have a finger print on the bottom side of the CD ? get a lint free papertowel and gently whipe it off.
Also I recommend putting in a CD-ROM inside your pc temporarily sometimes some DVD-RW drives can't get the XP CD to boot all the way through to setup the installation.
I have had this problem before and it's usually due to one of things I mentioned, finger prints or DVD-RW's that don't like booting XP disc's properly.

 

[KuriousJorj]

--WOW--

Well, just playing LOTR: BME, and the game locked up, system completely unresponsive...so I did a hard re-boot (is it called that when you hold in the power button?)

...AND NOW, IT STALLS IN BIOS AT THE "DETECT HARD DRIVES" or whatever it's called.

And I can't even ENTER BIOS [DEL] to see what's up!!!


The best part -- tomorrow, I'm to start a 3-week intensive videography workload work thousands of dollars!

Oh, thank you outsourcing!!!

 

[KuriousJorj]

You know, the most 'amusing' part is how the behavior changes (boot) when NOTHING ELSE DOES! Surely that's a hard drive 'going' bad.

 

[Jorsoft]

I think it might be going bad as well, this is an odd one. Try sticking it in another pc as a slave and running Disk Checker or similar on it, see if it returns errors and if they can be repaired.

Best to order yourself a new hd just so you don't lose your work next week, that would suck mightily.