Hard drive nightmares

[tina79]

Hi guys

 

A few days ago my pc suddenly displayed a ''disc boot failure, please insert system disc'' message on the black screen, tried a few things but no joy inclduing trying to instal vista again but it did not recognise any hd ..so i decided the hd must have died and ordered a new one with a new cable just in case it was that (the smaller cable only) anyway i fitted the new hard drive which is way above my pc knowledge, booted the pc up and same message appeared (disc boot failure) so i put the windows disc in and it proceeded to instal vista just fine (i did nothing other put the vista disc in , no format etc nothing) installs fine and works like a dream for about 24 hours but then i go out for a bit and the pc must have crashed or restarted and the dreaded boot disc message was back and from there on in wont do any anything when i try and install windows just says it cant find the hd

 

any ideas people???

 

some specs pc is a mesh 4 year old roughly old hd was a maxtor 300gb sata new one is a wd 500gb

[aFixedPC]

If I were you I'd just plug the single drive in and see if it boots. Also make sure you don't have a floppy disk in the drive, any USB sticks plugged in and no CD/DVDs in the drive(s).

 

If it doesn't boot I would reinstall Vista and reformat the drive. If your issue is intermittent then it could be a hardware fault or in need of a BIOS upgrade.

[tina79]

Hi do you mean just the new hard drive? if so thats the only one connected i took the old one out, no floppys or cds in either

 

I am not sure how i could reinstall or reformat the drive as it wont do anything after the disc boot failure message .. i can get into set up/ bios but no idea what to do there other than change the boot order which i have tried? is there any way to do these as when i insert the vista disc it just says no hd detected?

[Dalo Harkin]

Did you change anything the first time it displayed the error?

 

depending on who you listen to they tell you different things, IMO enter the BIOS and set the first boot device to HDD-0 then disable the rest of the other boot devices such as:-

CD/DVD rom

floppy drive (99% of people dont use these anymore)

removable media

boot from Ethernet (this is more common on business PCs)

 

when you do the above and SAVE and EXIT the BIOS, it should be fine.

[tina79]

Have just tried the above (though it simply said hard drive not HHD-0) but no success just the same boot failure message :(

[dane523]

Tina does your PC recognise either of the drives when it originally boots up. I have found that the message you are getting is usually to do with a faulty HDD, but this would not make sense for it to do it again with a brand new drive.

Have you been using an official Vista Disk?

If your BIOS cannot detect the hard drive then I would suggest that the new HDD is faulty also and that the Motherboard would be to blame (at a guess) I would suggest seeing if you can get a replacement on the new hard drive and then buying a new cheap motherboard to replace your current one.

 

I know this would be above your skill level but I can link you to some step by step guides which make the process really easy.