What does this mean? "Boot disk failure, insert system disk and press enter".?

Question

I'm assembling a computer and got this message when I turned it on.....black screen and this text in white.....plus a flashing cursor. I tried the OS disk (XP home with sp3) but it still says the same thing. What is not working?

Answer 1

Snoopdogg is right, bios needs changing to boot from the CDROM - at the point where Windows says "press any key" do it :D. If the OS has installed properly and you get this error, it is indeed an error with the boot sector - however, judging from your post your installing for the first time.



One thing to be aware of is that SATA and SCSI and even RAID' disks will need a separate disk as the Windows installation CD will not recognise the drives - this could be related? So make sure you have a floppy disk with all the drivers for the hard drive on and eventually when you get the disk to boot and it says "press any key for third party drivers" press some buttons until you get the menu and choose to load them off a floppy drive.



OH, also your floppy disk drive IDE cable is in upside down (this will not effect the boot process unless your trying to boot from it). The light remains on when the cables upside down, just switch the end which is plugged into your floppy drive the other way.

Answer 2

Assuming you have an existing installation of an OS on a local drive, the error message means either the boot sector of the drive is corrupted or there is nothing to boot into on the drive.



First, check and see if you can try booting to any other drives (or to the CD) from the alternative boot menu, if included with your system BIOS. (Mine's esc.) If you can run the XP setup disc, enter the recovery console and use CHKDSK X: /F, where X is the drive letter you're trying to boot from.



If you can't boot to a working drive from software, open up your PC (or have someone do it for you) (with the power off, of course) and make sure the connections are good. Are all your drives powered correctly? Are any connectors loose? If you're using PATA / IDE drives, are the jumpers and cable set correctly?



If your hardware connections are good but you can't boot into anything, your hard drive and/or optical drive are probably damaged.



Note: To boot into CD an alternative way, open your system BIOS and look for 'boot order' settings; change it to something like:



1. Floppy / Memory card

2. CD

3. Local Disks

4. Network

Answer 3

I would check the bios to make sure it boots from the cd drive before the hard drive



Also you may need to download SATA drivers to uses the hard drive (may not be a problem with XP) but it may be for your motherboad. You can usually get them at the support site of the hard drive I think.



As for the light always being on the fdd, I think they all develope this problem over time, and it may something simple as needing to resolder the pins back onto the circuit board for it. I even just pushed it back into place before and it worked nicly.

Answer 4

you didn't indicate whether you have one or two disks. If one disk you need to set the jumper to be the master disk. If two then one has to be master and the other slave making sure the master is the one with the operating system (probably your older disk). What it is telling you is that is does not 'see' an operating system. If they are new disks then you need to boot off of the installation CD and install an operating system. Hopefully your system can boot off the CD drvie (you might need to go into the bios to allow this).

Answer 5

well first off, is ur instalation disk in the cd drive? if so then wer did u get the boot disk? if u got it from microsoft u should be good to go, but if u got the iso file and burned it to a disk, then there r a whole number of things that could go wrong! message me if u burnt the iso image to a disc.

Answer 6

Are you installing the OS on a new hard drive? It really sounds like the hard drive is shot or the OS was corrupted when it was installed. You really need to update your question with as much information as you can. There are a number of possibilities.

Answer 7

your IDE or SATA connectors arent plugged in properly!!!



i get the same error sometimes.. then i have to open up my case and clean all the connecter ends and then try again. also sometimes when im working on something the computer randomly shuts down ten when i try to reboot it gives me that error.



just try plugging in the hard drive again and if your trying to use the CD drive make sure it is connected as well and configured in the BIOS.



good luck

Answer 8

Use your boot disk to get to the command prompt, then type "FDISK/MBR" without the quotes. This will rewrite the boot sector on your HDD with no data loss and machine should re-boot normally. Hope this helps.

Answer 9

I got the same thing one time and had to pay $60 to get it fixed.

lucky for you I can tell that the problem is that your hard drive is not connected well to your mother board.