Disk Boot Failure

[Raphael Argus]

A friend of mine has been getting some Disk Boot Failure messages. The last time he dumped his PC off on me to take a look at it I got it to boot up after about 10 times, ran some utility programs to test the hard disk and everything came back fine. After it booted fine once it continued to boot afterwards every time. Well, it seems from time to time this keeps happening to him. He called me today and said it won't boot(Disk Boot Failure). My questions are these:

Can heat cause this? This guys house is HOT HOT HOT. He's also running a 3ghz system with standard heat sink and one crummy case fan. He won't even keep his side panel off.

Last Question, in the even his hard disk has really failed, is it possible to recover the data from the hard disk using a utility program? I'm thinking of having him just purchase a new hard disk and trying to copy his data over, if possible. If you know a good recovery program/utility, please post the name or even a link.

Feel free to post any thoughts or ideas...

 

[Kadahaf]

Nutin to do with heat...mmm floppy check or is the HD the boot? If so get another HD and format and install windows then try from there

 

[Blind_Arrow]

check BIOS setting forst, as sometimes its set as floppy in priority to boot up system, as when someone lefts the floppy inside the drive and forgets to get it out, it gives same error.

as if this is the case, tell him to put CD/DVD in first boot priorty and H/D in second.

 

[Raphael Argus]

No floppy in the FDD. FDD is set to first boot device followed by CD Drive. Evidently he said he hit CTRL+ALT+DEL when he got the Disk Boot message and it gave him a message saying one of his drives needs to be checked for consistency, but then booted normally. He ran a scandisk and defrag without seeing any problems. Any ideas why this keeps happening?

He does have a somewhat cheap power supply unit. I know a lot of weird system instability can be attributed to crappy PSU's, does this sound like a possibility or the HDD just problematic?