Disk boot failure on new HDD

[Mr.G]

My son has bought a new hard disk to replace a faulty one (he has an old PC to play around with, but it's very important to him!) When he starts it up he gets the message: "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter". However, when he inserts the XP disk into the CD drive, the "disk boot failure..." message comes up again.

He has organized the boot order on the BIOS with the CD drive as No.1 and the new hard disk as No.2

He has checked the cables (the BIOS appears to 'see' all the drives). There are two hard disks and two CD drives, but he has tried both of the CD drives.

The BIOS gives a message along the lines of "ultra 100 BIOS cannot be read because there are no drives attached" - but it skips past this message and ends up at the "disk boot failure...."

Before he changed the hard drive, the XP disk would read, but now it doesn't even if he puts the old drive back in place (he gets the "disk boot failure..." message.

The PC is about 6 or 7 years old.

Anyway, if anyone could suggest a next step, he'd be so grateful.

 

[Jesse_hz]

"ultra 100 BIOS cannot be read because there are no drives attached"

One of the controllers isn't detecting any drives. Are you sure there's any drives connected to this controller? If 'yes', try using other controllers on the motherboard or try using some other SATA/PATA cables.

Or try using only one HDD and one CD-drive on the same controller. If it doesn't work in that configuration, try the the two drives on another controller.

 

[Mr.G]

Thanks a lot - I found that if I moved the CD cables temporarily from the IDE ports to the ATA ports I could boot successfully from the CD drive. I moved them back after XP had installed and all seems to work now.

 

[Jesse_hz]

I'm glad you figured it out.

If you have any more related problems, please post in this thread.