Can anyone help me with a disk boot error?

K

kilps

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Hi all - the other day my brothers windows pc crashed and every time I try and start it up I get the error "DISK BOOT FAILURE INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER" - all very well, so I try inserting an Ubuntu disk and nothing much happens after I press enter...

And when I try and boot from cd either, I still get the error, or I get a Debian/Ubuntu error telling me something about upgrading the BIOS

So considering that both the hard drive and cd drive are gone what could it be? The only thing which I can think of at the moment is that they are both connected by the same ide cable, so mabye I should try changing that around?

any other ideas? thanks
 
How old is the pc? Have you tried pressing f8 when booting? Tried resetting the bios?

Last time I got the disk boot failure error, was because I forgot that my usb stick was plugged in ;)
 
If you enter that problem message into Google it gives pages of links to people with similar problems.
Like this one. Although the guy answers himself most of the time, he is making progress.

I had a similar problem on my daughter's computer which I resolved the long way around.
The Boot Loader(MBR) got corrupted or something, which I think was due to the Card Reader. The Card Reader can be very troublesome as Windows will recognise it as a Hard Drive and allocate it a Drive Letter, usually the first one, like C, making a traditional Windows installation tricky if the actual Hard Drive you want to install to is unpartitioned at first.
If you attempt to install windows on a unpartitioned drive it will allocate Drive Letters to the Card Reader first and then the Hard Drive.

Anyway that was my particular experience which probably is unrelated to yours.
There are many ways to fix the Boot Loader file.
But I did it a different way.

Step 1. I copied all the files from my Windows Drive to within another folder on another Hard Drive for a back up and then I used a little program called FixMBR which is on the CD called MiniPE and totally wiped the partitions off the Hard Drive completely, using the command FixMBR for XP(something like that).
I unplugged the Card Reader completely and then inserted the Windows CD and did the usual installation letting Windows put in the partition and format.
Step 2. Working from outside windows. I use Total Commander within MiniPE to do this, I deleted all the new files off the drive and then copied the old files back.

Worked like a charm.
 
My problem seems to be that the bios is not booting from the cd .. i get the feeling the hard drive is screwed .... tomorrow i'll try moving some cables around
 
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