Hey everyone. I need a bit of help with my computer. It is an HP 864n, loaded with windows xp media center. Whenever I try to start it up I get a message that says "Disk Boot Failure, insert system disk and press enter." The computer was given to me from a friend of my sister and there wasn't any type of startup or recovery disks that came with it. It is basically a hand me down that was working great until a few days ago.

1) I've opened up the computer and checked all connections (unplugged and plugged from the hard drive and motherboard)

2) I've checked the bios. The computer recognizes the cd burner, dvd burner, and floppy drive but won't detect the hard drive.

3) I tried to reinstall a fresh copy of windows xp. When I press enter to load the new copy the computer says "setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer".

Anyone know what's going on here? Is my hard drive toast?


Also, If it's not too much to ask, anyone have a spare, older, dusty hard drive (ide connection) that you no longer use that you could donate to a worthy cause? I would like to try a working hd before I head to best buy and spend $80 bucks on a new one, not knowing if that is the problem or not.

Thanks...

Michael

Michael, I believe this is a fairly common problem, but I found this thread where people have resolved a similar issue to yours, and maybe something mentioned will work.

Thanks Cam. I'll give it a read and report back later.

Ahhh, one of my favorite errors. Your hard drive is toast.It happens to every hard drive eventually. You need a new drive.

Can you tell if it's spinning at all? When you power your system up, hold on to the drive - is it vibrating? Making a rhythmic clicking/clunking noise? Nothing at all? If it's doing nothing, it might be truly dead. Double check the power connections though. If it's vibrating, that's a good sign - the platters are spinning. It might just be a corrupt MBR (you'll still need a new drive, but the data might be salvageable). If it's clicking in a rhythmic manner, tick.....tick.....tick.....tick.... that's usually a bad sign as well.

I'd recommend NewEgg.com for replacement drives. NewEgg is usually very cheap and they're a pretty reliable company (IMHO). I know that when I've had drives fail, I buy my replacements from them. And my personal recommendation would be to buy a Western Digital drive, as in my 15 years of IT experience, I have experienced the least number of failures with WD drives, both in my personal life and on the job. Of course, if it's *not* the drive, if you buy it locally it'll be a lot easier to return...

The data on that old drive may or may not be salvageable. I've seen hard drives where just the Master Boot Record (MBR) conks out. In which case, you can't boot from the drive (you'll get exactly the message you're receiving) but it will spin up and work in a system, so long as some other drive does the booting. You could test this with a Live Eval CD of your favorite Linux distro; boot off the CD then see if the HD shows up.

Or, after you've got XP installed and running with the new drive, you could try putting the old drive in the system along with the new drive. Make sure you've got antivirus software running on the new system before you do this. Sometimes virii can play around with MBR's and cause the problem you've experienced. That old drive could possibly be infected with something.

Your PC likely has 4 IDE channels (Primary Master/Slave, Secondary Master/Slave), you'll need to make sure that the good-new drive is configured as the Primary Master and then set up the bad-old one as a Primary or Secondary Slave. Sometimes you select this in BIOS, but sometimes it involves jumpers on the drives themselves. The master drive attaches to the end of the IDE cable, and the secondary drive attaches in the middle. Hook 'em both up to power, and away you go. Your PC should still boot off the new drive. If you've led a clean and righteous life, that old drive may just show up in windows as another drive, probably E (if you've got a CD Rom drive for D). Then you can copy your data from the old drive to the new one. I wouldn't trust the old one any longer, though it might be just fine for years to come. Impossible to say. Personally, I wouldn't trust it.

I'll poke around in my computer parts drawer at home and see if I have an old IDE drives lying around. I don't think I do, but I'll check.....

Good luck!

maybe you can find a local shop that can run an HD test utility on your computer to verify its a dead drive?

BOMB!

I agree with Peter that your hard drive is bad but there is one thing to check just to make sure. Since your computer recognizes the other drives try plugging the hard drive into one of those slots and see if it recognizes it. It’s not likely to work but I have a motherboard with a bad IDE slot so it can happen.

Thanks for the advice, Peter. The hard drive doesn't make a peep. No vibrations, clicks, etc.

I've heard of Newegg and will probably order a Western Digital drive in the next few days.

That is a good idea. I don't think I've tried that yet. When I get home I will give it a whirl. Thanks.

It doesn't make any sound at all? I'd check the power cable to the drive. Perhaps it's worked itself loose (unlikely, but...) You could also swap that connector for a different one.

If it's not spinning at all, you can try tapping or knocking the drive a few times. Sometimes it gets 'unstuck' and start spinning again; that might get you a few minutes to backup any important files.

+1 on kcarlile's and JamieG's advice. Both excellent ideas.

But if that doesn't work, you can try the freezer.

Usually it doesn't work, so don't get too excited. But it is possible. Over the years, I've tried it or seen it tried on perhaps 20 dead hard drives. On all but one case, nothing. But on that one case, the frozen drive booted and functioned long enough to copy the important data off of it.

Here's an update. I took it in to a computer tech for testing and the result is what I and some of you suspected. The hard drive is dead. I didn't have any important info on it so it's not a big deal that it is gone.

I ordered a new drive(Western Digital) from Newegg on Tuesday and received it two days later. I hooked it up, ran the bios and was pleased that it recognized the new drive. Installed Windows xp and now I'm running strong again.

Thanks for all the suggestions and support.

Glad to hear you've got it up and running again.

Now pic up a usb drive and some backup software and start running regular backups.