Disk boot failure

8

8fingers

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 18, 2005
Messages
293
So I'm playing NFS:Carbon happily and all the sudden it freezes. Nothing is responding, so I hard reset the computer. It tries to reboot but says "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter" in BIOS. What the crap? I pop the Vista CD in to repair it, but when the repair utility comes up, it can't seem to recognize a vista install anywhere. I try System Restore - same problem. I try to select a device to boot from while still in BIOS, but neither of my hard drives are recognized. I try enabling the Silicon controller on my mobo (ASUS A8N-SLI Premium), but they aren't recognized there either. i pulled up the Silicon RAID utility just for fun and it sees both my hard drives, but that doesn't really help me. What to do? System in sig.
 
Were these drives in a RAID?

If so, your RAID setup may have been corrupted.
 
also tried running w/o overclock and (separately) unplugged CD-ROM. same error still. When I've tried to repair the installation w/o selecting a Vista installation (because it doesn't show up), it runs for awhile and then says it can't fix it. It does show a log of the tests it ran and it looks like the partition table is corrupt. Is there a way to fix that without spending $50+ on a program?
 
8fingers said:
Disk not found.
Error Code 0120.

next...?
Click to expand...

This is what the error code means:
20 Unknown Error An unknown error has occurred during testing. This may be an anomaly. Check connections and retest. If the error repeats, replace the drive. Re-Test Drive
Click to expand...

Also, can you put the drives in another PC and see if that one detects the drives?
 
Danny Bui said:
This may be an anomaly.
Click to expand...

Great.

I just put my boot disk into another comp, recognized it without a problem. I'm downloading Ultimate Boot CD now, hopefully there's a helpful tool on there? Been running memtest for the last 45 minutes just for fun, hasn't shown anything yet.
 
8fingers said:
UBCD failed... I have no idea why it won't work.
Click to expand...

Because it doesn't have drivers for your disk controller. I believe the UBCD is a custom Bart PE disk. It includes some nice programs and utils, but it may not have drivers that are needed for your particular computer.

On another computer, build a Bart PE CD and include your controller drivers in the build.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

It's probably easier to just take the hard drives to the other computer to see if you can recover your data and/or fix the problem. If your hard drives are recognized ok on the other computer, then you've narrowed down the problem. If that's the case, clear the CMOS, then setup your BIOS config again and then see if your system sees the drives.
 
Ok, I managed to install vista back on a new hardrive and i've decided that the nvidia sata controller is dead. the silicon controller is still working though. the hard drives show up in windows just fine, but still nothing if i try to boot from it. they just don't show up?!? i'm going to try booting from an ubuntu cd soon and repair the tables that way... will that work?

ninja edit: i need this hard drive back
 
Well in the BIOs, did you make sure that the SATA drives on the silcon chip are part of the bootup?
 
Were you by any chance overclocked whe the failure occured?
Some motherboards with 2 sets of IDE controllers raise the speed of one controller when you clock the FSB. The controller might have decided it doesnt want to work at that speed any more.
I had this happen on an NForce 3 motherboard and could not use the RAID IDE controllers when overclocked a lot.
 
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