GLO

Hi All,

My no so little brother's Acer Aspire SA10 is giving me the
disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter

error.

I have pulled the HDD and reformatted it, and then used the Acer Recovery discs but once that is complete i still get the above error.

I cant even load one of my slipstreamed XP installation CDs.

What could i have missed?

Thanks

edit: could a potential weak HDD motor cause this?

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Rockin'male

Hey glo!

It sounds like a borked drive to me. I could be wrong but that's my initial thought.

If possible attach the drive to another PC and run a chkdsk on it in dos (start, run, type cmd, press enter, type chkdsk x: (x=drive letter). This will validate the integrity of the drive. If it takes a long time or fails then its time for a replacement. Also try using another ide/sata cable, Its possible the cable could be bad.

I do hope this info helps....

BigAkita

Borked drive or you haven not set the partition correctly. It needs to be set as a primary boot partition. I would delete all partitions first, then start from scratch with newly formatted partitions before I looked at getting another drive.

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piscikeeper

use the disk manufacturer's tools to do a low-level format. then run hitachi drive fitness test to check it.

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GLO

Hi Crew!

Once i pulled the drive i connected it via a USB to IDE adapter and separate power supply then formatted the drive i created 3 partitions, all primary partitions, OS, programs and data.

I also ran HDD Tune and check for bad sectors, which it didnt find any.

Will Hitachi Drive Fitness offer much insight over HDD Tune?

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piscikeeper

never used hdd tune so i don't know.........i do know dft let me use a bad hdd (13gb reformatted to about 7gb) to work around bad sectors and run linux distos on it.

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GLO

Quote: Originally Posted by piscikeeper never used hdd tune so i don't know.........i do know dft let me use a bad hdd (13gb reformatted to about 7gb) to work around bad sectors and run linux distos on it.

What is dft? (i have been looking to resurrect other HDDs with bad sectors)

edit: i just figured out drive fitness test.

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Lokie

I would recommend giving spinrite a try on all those bad drives.

GLO

Guys, i figured that it was a weak motor in the 120gb Seagate, so i bought a new 160gb seagate and i am still having the same boot problems. I can load the recovery disks but it wont boot into the OS.

Could it be a Bios issue? or something else???

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eascarface

I don't think it's your BIOS but it can't hurt to reset it and see what happens. Which of your partitions is set as the system boot partition?


EDIT: Do you have a floppy loaded?

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GLO

It was a brand new disk, allowing the Recovery Disk to assign the single partition.

No floppy

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piscikeeper

either the new disk is bad too, cable or mobo.first thing to try would be to boot from an xp disk (not the recovery cd's) and run fixboot and fixmbr.

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GLO

Quote: Originally Posted by piscikeeper either the new disk is bad too, cable or mobo.first thing to try would be to boot from an xp disk (not the recovery cd's) and run fixboot and fixmbr.

ok.,will give that a try, but dont you think the odd thing is that it will allow the full installation of the recovery disks and only when it has to boot into the OS that this fault occurs.

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piscikeeper

i think the "full install" from recovery disks is just a drive image, hence it may not re-write the mbr.
*not positive, every oem machine i get my hands on runs linux

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BeetleMan

Have you tried with an external cd drive?
I had same problem, couldn't load an OS on several hdd's, finally tried another dvd drive, and voila, it helped. Now my problem was sata drivers, my initial dvd drive was a sata drive, second one I tried(the one that worked) was an ide drive.....

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