Boot Disk Failure

K

Karen

Geek Trainee
I have a computer running both Vista and XP as dual boot. While it was on, and no one using it, a black screen with "boot disk failure, insert system disk" came up. I inserted the Vista OS disk and did the repair option. The details section only seemed to indicate one problem:
The partition table does not have a valid system partition.
Repair action: Partition table repair
Result: completely successful. Error code = 0X0

Restarted, and again got the "boot disk failure". Tried the repair again. Still wouldn't boot up.

Shut everything down and checked the cables. Restarted, got "boot disk failure". Inserted Vista OS CD, but it wouldn't load this time. There are two CD drives, but the OS CD didn't load in either drive. I just keep getting the same error message every time I click Enter.

Any suggestions?
 
I'd suggest taking the hard drive out, backup any important data and put the hard drive back and clean install the OS.
 
Any time you have two system on the same hard drive and you remove one, You will have Problems with the boot Manager... You will need to remove both boot managers and wipe the entire hard drive and start fresh..
 
I would reformat the disk and reinstall the OS, but the OS disk won't open at all. I only get the "boot disk failure", hit enter, and get "boot disk failure" again, over and over again.

I disconnected the boot drive, and tried the OS CD on the secondary drive. It opened with no errors. Reconnected the boot drive, and I just get the same error in a continuous loop.
 
I should have thought of switching cables when I disconnected the main drive and tried just the secondary drive. I did switch the SATA cables today, and that seems to have been the problem. I don't have an extra cable (or maybe I do, but not handy), so I just connected the main drive cable to the secondary drive, and vice versa. The computer booted up perfectly - no error messages! I was still able to access the secondary drive with the "bad" cable though, which I'm not sure I understand.

Then just to make sure, I reconnected the "bad" cable to the main drive, and got the same error message about boot disk failure. So I switched the cables again, and the computer booted right up. Looks like I don't need to reinstall any OS at all.

So thank you! Looks like the problem is solved.
 
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