disk failure on boot up

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newbuilder

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My friend has a Dell computer (Pent. III - so old!)

He is running XP but on the system boot up it comes up Disk failure on Drive 1.... disk failure on drive 2.

The thing is after it times itself out you press F1 and the thing finds the disk alright. Is this a HDD fauilt or MBOARD Fault?

How do I bypass these disk failures. Can I configure manually and if so where do I find the settings for the disk.

Also he is talking about getting a new 40GB disk. Will the motherboard cope and be able to find it itself?

Or will I have to configure it manually?
 
first of all there's absolutly nothing wrong with pIII based systems, until i upgrade anyway!

second of all, the two disk failures are probably normal, this is most likely to be your machine checking for bootable devices, depending on your config, a machine will traditionally check for a bootable floppy in your floppy disk drive if not found then it will check you optical drives, if still not found it will move to your hard disk where it should find a bootable volume and o/s and start to load your o/s.

if you wish to speed up your machines boot time then you can change the boot sequence to hard drive first, thus skipping the floppy and optical checks, in your bios.

the above maybe nonsence but is the most lkely senario, especially with the limited details you have provided.

in answer to the 40GB hdd question, the motherboard should be fine although i cannot confirm this as you have failed to supply any info on the board.

Why waste your money on a 40GB hdd when for £20 more you could get a 120GB? seems silly to me.

the motherboard will find the new hard drive by itself as long as you've set the jumpers correctly. a BIOS flash maybe required for the motherboard to see the full capacity of the drive.

newbuilder, at least tell us what model of dell machine is then i/we can help more. hard to give solid advice with so little details. ;)
 
Thanks Techy.

I will give further details when I go and check the system out.

I only wanted general advice to see if it was worth me travelling to get the info needed.

The disk failures do not look like the normal - cannot find boot, as they hang on this screen for about 20 secs.

This happens before the option to enter the bios set up. That is why I think it is looking for the type of HDD rather that whether or not it is bootable.

e.g. Switch on computer, see BIOS ref, searches for type of HDD, volume etc, fails, asks you to press F1 to continue or F2 for bios setup. Press F1 then it goes to Win XP.

Is this clear, it is kind of hard to explain.

Spec of machine to follow.
 
i'll wait for the spec, but the first thing that would try would be to disconnected any optical drives and floppy drive(s) and see if the problem persists, i would rule out hard disk problem because the machine is booting to XP ok, unless you've any other probs with the hard disk?

let me know the spec and what you've tried.

James
 
... asks you to press F1 to continue or F2 for bios setup. Press F1 then it goes to Win XP.
Click to expand...
Change the MB 'battery' & reset the BIOS.
 
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