Disk Boot Failure! Please help!

[Matvey]

I have reformated my computer and it still goes to a black screen and ssays disk boot failure.

I then reformated and reinstaled windows service pack 2 and it worked for a day and went back to Disk Read Error.

Im fed up with trying to fix it. What part or parts do I need to buy and replace for theis problem to go away?

 

[ParkQuick.com]

I think you need to buy a hard drive. Not too expensive these days.

 

[PapaStiz]

Healing is right. It is your HDD. You can go to bestbuy and pick up a 80 giger for under 80 bucks. I just did the same thing you are doing.

Good luck, PM me if you need any help.

 

[Matvey]

Well it reformatted and loaded from disc after error and is having same problem so couldnt it be something other than a hdd?

 

[interlution]

I'm not a HD expert, but the boot sector might be corrupt.

You have to do a low level format to fix that.

There are utilities for that but you probably have to use the one from the manufacture and you can break the drive doing a low level format incorrectly.

A normal format does not actually format the whole disk, as far as I know, and won't touch the boot sectors. Also a regular format may not fix the corrupt sectors during its format.

Best bet is to buy a nice new harddrive...

 

[BostonDomainer]

Sounds like your Hard Drive... probably have a bad sector were some criticle drivers are. The problem could also be due to physical damage of your drive or you can have a boot sector virus.

Scan the drive with an Antivirus Software if you have the luxury of placing it in another computer.

 

[DNjet]

run a full scandisk from a floppy boot disk and see if you have errors on the C drive, chances are that you do.

 

[PapaStiz]

Doesn't matter if you format it or not. I formatted my HDD 3 times and each time I tried to load windows it went nuts. A low level format may or may not help...with the price of storage these days I would just pay the 80 (or less) bucks and be done with it.

Hope you get it solved!

 

[Matvey]

It was a 250 gigabyte SATA hardrive with basically all my stuff on it but ok =)

We should have a Paul fundraiser now =)

Im still able to get on the computer every few hours but it shuts off withinh a few minutes.

Would it be safe to just plug in another hardrive right now that is older from a old windows 2000 computer and reformat that and see if it works?

Then if it does I know its the hardrive and I can goahead and pay the $185.00 it will cost to get a hd of my quality.

 

[PapaStiz]

Sure if the other HDD is working fine then you can plug it in and use it for the time being.

If it is the only drive on the other machine it should already be set to "master". If it is a second drive in a dual drive setup it is probablys set to "slave". If that is the case you will need to fix the jumper settings to make it master since it will be the only drive in the PC that is broken.

Anyhow, good luck..if you need any specific help PM me.

Regards!

 

[DNjet]

what do you mean by "shuts off every few munites"? goes to the disk error? or completely shuts off.

 

[Matvey]

Restarts and when it come son it says disk boto error. But ill be abck in a little while preforming transplant now.

 

[interlution]

As far as data recovery. If you lost data. I've used this before:

http://www.runtime.org/

GetDataBack.

I was amazed that it recovered data from a harddrive that I accidentally formatted and reinstalled windows on.

 

[Matvey]

I plugged in the other hardrive and it said disk boot failure to that to so idk if its because windows inst loaded on it or something i dont know.

 

[DNjet]

yes, you would have to have some windows version on it to boot., also make sure the jumper is set to master.

 

[BostonDomainer]

Restarts and when it come son it says disk boto error. But ill be abck in a little while preforming transplant now.

I'm actually having a similar problem with my desktop right now. I know for a fact it's not my hard drive because I installed windows on 2 seperate drives and received the problem. I've narrowed it down to my processor or some sort of memory leak because now everything runs but very slow and jaggedy with the cpu usage in the Task Manager at or near 100 all the time. Thank god for my trusty laptop.

 

[Matvey]

It had windows 98 on it or it should have. And I have no idea if its reading to that hard drive or not.

If I completely unplug my hardrive and plug the other one in it has to be installing to the old one I plugged in right?

 

[Matvey]

Im on my infected or whatever computer right now with that hard drive. If I buy a new motherboard and harddrive theres no way this problem can continue is there?

 

[DNjet]

if it had win98 on it then it would have booted up , to be honest this is starting to look like a bad stick of memory more and more.

 

[BostonDomainer]

It had windows 98 on it or it should have. And I have no idea if its reading to that hard drive or not.

If I completely unplug my hardrive and plug the other one in it has to be installing to the old one I plugged in right?

Yes... make sure you plug it in the same cable and make sure the jumper is set correctly to master.