Disk Boot Failure !

[marcuscool1988]

Hi there everyone !

My desktop is having a problem with booting up. I have tried changing to a new HDD, changing the Serial ATA cable, changing the BIOS setting so that the first to be boot-ed is the CD-ROM (which I do have an original XP disc with me) but all this is still not helping!!!

Everytime i start up the machine, it would pass through the motherboard setup page and then it hits the "Disk Boot Failure" page. Ive tried putting in the XP disc to reformat the new HDD and try to get out of the Disk Boot Failure page but it would not budge !

The BIOS has not be touched before this problem arise nor has it been updated to the best of my knowledge. I'm all out of idea and I hope some experts can enlighten me on this issue.

I have read the response from the other threads but since I am not really familiar with fixing computers I have only done the usual steps when a person encounters this prob. All help is very much appreciated !

[Kevin_gibson]

Hi,

Does your computer recognise your new HDD in BIOS? Does it also recognise your CDROM drive in BIOS? or on POST?

If it does, try and use another XP CD or any kind of bootable CD, Norton is ok for this. If it reads other disk, then your xp is prolly faulty, either clean it thoroughly, or get another 1.

If it doesn't read any cds, and you try another DVD drive, and the issue continues, then I'm afraid it's probably your motherboard that's failed.

Try the above steps first before going for a mainboard.

[marcuscool1988]

hey there gibson !

thank you so much for your quick reply. I just found out what went wrong a minute ago. I was hitting the wall when I did everything and yet my pc was not booting up properly.

And then something hit me while I was just looking around in the chasis. I have 2, 1 GB sticks of RAM and I went ahead with my itchy fingers to move it to the then empty set of RAM sockets on my mobo. And whola ! It booted up just like normal. I think I blew one or 2 of the RAM sockets. It's probably the heat of the RAM that got it fused because I am only using normal RAM sticks without the huge a$$ heat sinks attached to it.

Man looks like I have an extra 160 GB of space now. But at least I've manage to get it back up and going !

[Kevin_gibson]

lol, I suppose I was right in some ways with your faulty ram slots by saying it could be your mainboard!

Glad you got it sorted bud