system boot failure....

[bakler]

ok i have three hdds installed, 2 ide and one sata. my windows is installed on the sata and is recognized as drive e. everything was working fine until i decided to format the other 2 hard drives. now everytime i try to boot windows it says. SYSTEM BOOT FAILURE-INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND HIT ENTER. i cant for the life of me figure out what is wrong. plz help

 

[Kage]

Since you formatted them, it might be the case that your drive letter names have somehow switched, so its possible your Sata drive might not be E anymore.

its just a guess, but that error just means it can't find the bootable disk, and since the Sata drive is the one used, it makes sense.

You'll need to go into Bios.

Have you ever been into it before?

If not, you should be able to press Del on bootup to enter it, and hopefully a few menus should then appear.

In one of the two first menus (depending on bios make) there should be this type of thing:

1st boot:
2nd boot:
3rd boot: ,etc

Set the Sata drive to boot first from here,
and maybe a CD/DVD drive second,
and if you have a floppy drive, that 3rd.

You then navigate back out by pressing Escape, and select Save And Exit from the main menu, and your computer will restart.

Hopefully now it'll boot up.
I hope this helps

 

[bakler]

I just tried that out and it didn't work. I usually know what i am doing with computers and repair cause that is what i am going to school for, but i just cant think of what is wrong.

 

[Kage]

Weird.

I'm afraid I have no experience with Sata drives

I've heard so much bad things about them, and can't see any reason why IDE should not be used any more, so have never wanted to use SATA.

 

[bakler]

maybe i had the boot.ini on one of the other hard drives or something like that cause normally when i run windows it recognizes my sata drive as removable i.e. there is that little "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the systray.

 

[Kage]

Thats always the case though, as SATA drives always seem to appear removable.

I guess that is possible, but its strange Windows would have strayed to another hard drive for this data, when the main installation was within the Sata drive.

 

[bakler]

yea i agree, i just decided to do a clean install on one of the other hds and will just copy all my data to the new hd.

 

[_Niko]

Did u check the jumper settings on the two IDE hard drives? Because mixing a SATA drive with two IDE drives gets really complicating and not everything is on your mind at once

Check the jumpers

 

[bakler]

ok this may be a newb question, but what should the jumpers be on the ide drives? i believe they are set to cable select. should they both be on slave?

 

[JustinMcG67]

Actually, I believe this is not a Hard Drive issue, or an Operating System issue, it's a GRUB issue.

GRand Unified Bootloader. This here is what actually makes your system boot up. I'm not forcertain how you configure it via Windows, I'v eonly ever done it using Linux. So, I can't give you advice on hwo to go about fixing it, I can just point you in the right direction.