PC won't boot without disk.

Bluephoria2Bluephoria2 Silver Spring, Maryland
edited May 2008 in Hardware
My Setup

AMD X2 4600+
2GB ram
74gb WD Raptor
320gb Seagate
160gb Hitachi
NEC 16x dvd/rw
plextor 8x dvd/rw
nVidia 7600GT
Asus M2N-SLi Deluxe
Vista Ultimate

I had a problem similar to this about two months ago. One day my pc suddenly decided to stop booting up. It would post normally, but once it came time to load the OS it would display the "system boot failure -- insert system disk and press any key to continue". I was pretty blown at first, and I tried booting from the vista cd to try and repair windows. Well when it came up I wasn't paying attention and forgot to "press any key to boot from disk" and it went and booted to windows instead. So it would boot to windows off of the hdd while the vista disk was in the dvd drive, but refused to without it.
I kept snooping around the bios, and found out that somehow the hdd order was changed under boot device priority so that it was trying to boot off the hitachi. I wasn't sure why this was happening, but I changed it back and it worked fine.

So then a month passed, and the motherboard started going bad (onboard lan went, locked up constantly) so I bought a new board (same model) and installed it and it worked fine, except the same problem is occurring now with the boot sequence. I double checked and all of the orders are correct, but I have no idea where to go from here. I checked and the drives are fine.

Thanks for the help, sorry its so long I wanted to be thorough.

Comments

  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited May 2008
    Try booting up with the windows disk in, go into repair console and do FIXMBR.
  • tmh88tmh88 Pittsburgh / Athens, OH
    edited May 2008
    Anyone think that the new mobo could be picky with the jumper configurations on the drives? Other than trying to repair/fix the MBR, thats my only suggestion.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited May 2008
    Anyone think that the new mobo could be picky with the jumper configurations on the drives?
    I doubt. His computer had been booting properly for some time, then started having problems. In the interim, he had not changed the drive's jumper configuration, or at least he didn't states so in this thread.
  • tmh88tmh88 Pittsburgh / Athens, OH
    edited May 2008
    He said that he just installed a new mobo yesterday. Even though its the same model, its still a different board and we all know how electronics can sometimes act strange.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited May 2008
    He said that he just installed a new mobo yesterday.
    Oh, yes, good point. Blue~, check the jumpers on the drives. Set them to "Cable Select" and see if you can boot.
  • Bluephoria2Bluephoria2 Silver Spring, Maryland
    edited May 2008
    Thanks for the advice guys. I have never changed jumpers on a SATA drive before, so I went to WD's website to look at the configurations and this is what I found.

    http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2079-001042.pdf

    To be honest after reading that I don't know where I would move the jumper to if I were to move it. I will try using the FIXMBR command and see if you guys have any ideas for the jumper.

    Thanks.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited May 2008
    SATA drives have no jumpers to move. Don't worry about it.
  • Bluephoria2Bluephoria2 Silver Spring, Maryland
    edited May 2008
    Hey guys. When I was attempting to run fixmbr, I noticed that windows had decided to install itself on the WD Raptor as I had planned, however it changed the drive letter to (E:). I deleted the partition and unplugged all of the other drives and reinstalled windows, and now it seems to be booting ok.

    Thanks for the time though. :)
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