Boot drive failure

[Kiro-San]

On Thursday Windows update prompted me to download IE8. I don't use IE very much but I figured it would be worth having the latest version. After it downloaded and installed I rebooted my PC and was greeted with: Disk Boot Failure Please insert boot disk and press enter.

The boot order of the drives is unchanged but I've manually selected the boot drive at start up with no luck. I've run Hitachi's DFT advanced scan on all three hard drives on my PC (twice) and all of them come back 0x00 (no errors/problems). Today I grabbed a copy of Knoppix 6 and I can access the boot drive in that without a problem. Windows is installed on one of the 7K250 250GB hard drives. Hardware is:

Asus Striker Extreme
Intel QX6700 Stock
Video card(s) brand & model
2GB Dominator PC8500
Gainward SLI 8800 GTX
HGST 1TB 7K1000
2 x HGST 250GB 7K250

[mightymouse]

why dont you pop in the windows install cd and try the recovery, assuming its vista, dont remember the process for xp but i think its the same too

[CrazyMonkey]

dont remember the process for xp but i think its the same too

Yes XP can do this too.

Enter Windows XP Recovery Console.

When you reach the command prompt -

bootcfg /rebuild (try the others too)
The bootcfg utility will scan your hard drives for any Windows XP installations and then display the results. Follow the steps to repair the boot process.

Check out the 'bootrec.exe' command via your Vista DVD.
Boot from your DVD and choose the 'Command Prompt' option, after entering
System Recovery.

bootrec /?

eg

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /rebuildbcd

Have a go with that, should be able to rebuild the entire boot process.

[Kiro-San]

Booted to the recovery console and ran chkdsk before giving fix* commands a go. Qucik chkdsk found nothing but chkdsk /p found some errors. Uses chkdsk /r to fix them and the system booted straight after. Going to backup my boot partition to an external drive now. Also the HDD is pretty old so I'm going to replace it with a newer model. Might just replace both the 250GB drives in my computer as prices are so cheap at the moment.

Thanks for the tip about using the XP discs recovery feature, never would've thought of it.

[CrazyMonkey]

No worries mate, glad it's fixed.