Disk boot failure

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware (More info?)

Ok, this is kind of weird... I'm not sure why this has happened, because
nothing was wrong before, but here's a short explaination of how it
happened...

I was playing Counter-strike: Source (some of you may have heard of it
), and things were fine. About 20 minutes into it, my system locked
up. The sound repeated in a garbled, scrathy loops, and nothing
responded for a full minute, leaving me with nothing to do but press
the restart button on my desktop. Upon the next boot, the system could
not test my memory; It started reading it slowly, instead of
immediately. After reading the GB of RAM, it repeated, doing the same
thing. It did that 3 times, then moved on to reading the drives. It
couldn't even read the primary master drive, let alone the slave
drives, and then moved onto the next screen, "Verifying DMI Pool Data,"
where after 5 seconds of that, it says "Disk Boot Failure, Inster System
Disk and Press Enter."

That's my story, sad but true. I tried to express what happened in
detail. I hadn't uninstalled anything (That I know of... My girlfriend
was the last one to use the computer), and the only thing I did was
play CS:S. Can anyone give me any help?


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Stimpeh
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[null]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware (More info?)

Stimpeh wrote:

> Ok, this is kind of weird... I'm not sure why this has happened, because
> nothing was wrong before, but here's a short explaination of how it
> happened...
>
> I was playing Counter-strike: Source (some of you may have heard of it
> ), and things were fine. About 20 minutes into it, my system locked
> up. The sound repeated in a garbled, scrathy loops, and nothing
> responded for a full minute, leaving me with nothing to do but press
> the restart button on my desktop. Upon the next boot, the system could
> not test my memory; It started reading it slowly, instead of
> immediately. After reading the GB of RAM, it repeated, doing the same
> thing. It did that 3 times, then moved on to reading the drives. It
> couldn't even read the primary master drive, let alone the slave
> drives, and then moved onto the next screen, "Verifying DMI Pool Data,"
> where after 5 seconds of that, it says "Disk Boot Failure, Inster System
> Disk and Press Enter."
>
> That's my story, sad but true. I tried to express what happened in
> detail. I hadn't uninstalled anything (That I know of... My girlfriend
> was the last one to use the computer), and the only thing I did was
> play CS:S. Can anyone give me any help?
>
>

Could be lots of different possible problems, but I would check the cpu
fan to be sure it is working - the cpu may be fried.

You could try putting a DOS boot disk in and see if it'll boot to that -
if it does, then it's probably the hard drive.

Or, it could have been a power surge or power supply problem. Check the
power supply - sometimes the fan fails on that and you need to replace
the power supply. If it is the power supply, hopefully nothing else got
toasted.

Or, it could be a BIOS problem - go in and have it re-detect the hard drive.

Whatever the problem, I recommend buying a UPS once you've fixed it.

--
The reader should exercise normal caution and backup the Registry and
data files regularly, and especially before making any changes to their
PC, as well as performing regular virus and spyware scans. I am not
liable for problems or mishaps that occur from the reader using advice
posted here. No warranty, express or implied, is given with the posting
of this message.