Hard disk gives "DISK BOOT FAILURE" error

My hard drive seems to have gone bad when I was out of the country on business. My kids were using the computer, so I'm not sure what went wrong. They said something about the hard drive making a noise, and Windows failing a few minutes after booting up.

Now it won't boot at all. It shows the "Boot from CD :" line, and then says "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER "

Looking at other posts gave me a few things to try. I've tried the Windows XP recovery console. It does not work. It cannot seem to find the hard disk. The BIOS sees the hard drive, however.

It's a Western Digital 120 GB drive that is probably three or four years old by now. I do have Partition Magic installed on it, I believe, so I'll dig that out and try to see what it can find.

Any other suggestions? If I need to replace the hard drive, can I copy the contents over to the new drive directly so that I do not need to reinstall anything?

Thank you.

 

I hooked the hard drive up to another computer. That computer "sees" the drive is there, through the Device Manager, but cannot read anything off of it.

I fear the prognosis is grim. Unfortunately, that hard drive has some data on that I need to recover somehow.

Any thoughts welcome.

 

Try the Partition Magic program as well. I have had it say that it needs to "repair" the drive, all went back to normal after that. It has a few testing utilities.

From the other computer, run Error Checking (chkdsk) on the drive.

Matt

 

Can anyone recommend a service that gets data off a bad hard drive? (I live in California.)

Also, I heard that there is software that can get data off an unmountable hard drive (ie, a hard drive that Windows cannot read). Anyone heard about any software like that?

 

Daanii:

Just do a Google search for data recovery company and call a couple few or visit their websites to determine where you might find an affordable solution. A price in the range of $1000 can be expected but you may get lucky. Most reputable services will diagnose your drive and provide a cost estimate for no charge.

 

Hi Daanii,
If the data that you wish to recover is very important you could try 'Spinrite' from GRC, which can very often recover dead drives. It costs $89 but that is much cheaper than any of the data recovery companies I think, and would avoid their 2 to 3 week deliveries. Just a thought!

Roger