Cheemag

Windows XP Home SP-2
3072M Memory
1.80 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64

First start in the morning, XP won't boot. Disk Error - press any key...

If I persist by hitting the reset button often enough it will eventually boot. As far as I can tell, using the Seagate/Maxtor diagnostics, both discs are in good shape. The BIOS tells me:

IDE prim master - ZIP (H:)
IDE prim slave - none
IDE sec master - DVD-2 (G:)
IDE sec slave - none

IDE third master - Maxtor 6V250 0F0 (C:) (Boot disc)
IDE fourth master - none
IDE fifth master - WDC WD2500KS-00MJ (D:)
IDE sixth master - DVD1 (F:)
Floppy (A:)

3rd to 6th should be SATA, not IDE. However the one called fifth master is a PATA (IDE) device (!!) I don't know why it's listed among the SATA devices.

There's no dual boot and both hard drives are NTFS all one partition.

It all worked up until I installed a large batch of XP updates. Rebooting after that it failed and has taken a lot of work to get it to boot since then.

Yesterday, after I finally got it to boot, I re-installed the system from a recent Acronis image. This went well, but the same error rebooting this morning:

Disk error - press any key
Boot from CD
Boot from CD
Disk error - press any key
etc etc.

I have run the repair dialogue from the XP CD, but this ends at the command prompt in C:\Windows with no instructions as to what to do next! Only appears to accept >dir and >exit.

Any ideas?

Regards,

Jim

Cheemag

No-one any ideas? Dear me!

SOLVED.

The stupid computer was trying to boot from the ZIP-disc which is at the top of the BIOS queue.

I can only imagine the MS update included alterations to the boot priority, as this has never happened before in the ten years I've been using this computer.

Another XP Home machine had the same updates applied, but did not suffer this problem. However that machine did not have a ZIP disc or mixed PATA and SATA drives.

--

Jim.