Hello fellas, need a little help from you all, here's the story: My sister's computer is giving the error message "disk boot error - insert system disk to continue," so I replaced her hard drive with a brand new one, and changed the boot order in the bios to the dvd rom drive first so I could install windows on it. Thing is the error message still appears on startup. The bios can see the new hard drive, so I'm not exactly sure what to do next. I'm assuming it's got to be some kind of bios setting, just wondering if anyone has encountered a problem like this before. It would really suck if I had to replace her whole motherboard. Any suggestions?
Do you have a floopy in the floopy drive. I cant tell you how many times that happened to me back when I actually used floppys lol. However if you set it to boot from the HDD first then it shouldnt even check the floppy drive 0_o I would try makeing sure there are no CDs or Floppys in. If that dosent work unplug all drives but the HDD and try again. If all else fails pull the cmos jumper and let cmos reset then put the jumper back ( on some you have to move the jumper to another set of pins, not just pull it)
That's the thing, there is no floppy drive attached. Micjohvan, I'll try what you suggested about CMOS. thanks
What model of MB is that? I would suggest having a look around - sometimes its truly only a matter of settings...you could try to take the current off the floppy drive to see what happens, it could be a broken floppy drive too! Besides, who needs floppys in todays era of USB sticks??? :lol:
Also consider checking the jumper settings on the drive you just installed. Are there two drives on the same IDE cable? If so, either set both to 'Cable Select' or set the one on the end of the cable to 'Slave' and the one half-way down the cable to 'Master'. Something else that might work is reseat the memory modules and make sure the IDE cables are firmly pushed into the motherboard socket. Sometimes they looklike they are in fully but aren't in reality. Worth a try anyway.
Yeh. Double check the jumper settings on the hard drive and make sure they are both on cable select (makes it easier). Also, in the BIOS be sure to setup the boot order correctly. and make sure the C: drive (if it is multiple HDDs you have) is the first one to look for an OS. I have multiple drives and if it looks at my D: drive first it will give me an NTLDR error. So I had to change my HDD boot order so that it looks in the C: drive first.
Is there any chance this is a Dell or a Gateway? The only reason I ask is because I've repaired quite a few of these in my time. For some reason, the ide controllers will die prematurely and give you this exact cryptic message upon startup regardless of whats on the other end of the cable or how any jumpers are configured. If I was troubleshooting it, my immediate next step would be to test the old hard drive on a different computer to verify operation. Don't fumble around with bios and jumper settings (even though they could be the culprit) until you know what the status of that drive is.
Dude STOP! I had the SAME problem (exactly the same) and it took me almost a half a month to fix it. How did I do it? I open the case, disconnect the SATA cable from the motherboard, then pluggin it in another SATA port (in the MB) close the case, power up and.......it worked! windows booted and now it works just fine. You can plug it in the same port again if you want, it doesnt matters. Apparently the BIOS jammed and changing the SATA port had a refresh effect on it. Dunno why it happened, nor how exactly my solution fixed the problem, but it did and is better than having a $2000 paperweight:lol:
i had the same problem, but a bit different, when i tried to format the drive it told me it was a 5gig hdd instead of 40gig , just try a new ide cable.
Hmm, didn't think about SATA. Check to see if you have a floppy with the SATA drivers on it if you are installing Windows XP onto a fresh SATA HDD. You need to boot from the floppy first, then it will prompt you to run the Windows XP disc. I'm not sure if Media Edition is fine, they might have fixed that issue by now. EDIT > since you don't have a floppy, try booting the drivers from a USB flash drive or CD-ROM! Aside from wiping the BIOS back to defaults you might also want to try changing the CMOS battery if the system is very old, as a failing battery can cause corruption of the BIOS. It could also be a dying IDE controller, as jwhazel said. If all else fails try buying a PCI IDE controller card (they're dirt cheap, usually) and try plugging the drives into that instead.
