Hi guys, Woke up to a meltdown.

[hollywoodhills7]

I'm on Windows XP. A clone purchased at Frye's a couple of years ago.

I woke up to the following message displayed between reboot / crashes:

"There is no disk in the harddrive. Please insert a disk into drive\Device\Harddisk1\DR2."

I'm hoping to get the system to work in a 'distressed' mode, until I can get a new desktop (if necesary) and transfer contents to new system.

Any comments or suggestions greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Mark

[Paleo Pete]

Sounds like a good chance of a dead hard drive, don't have your hopes up for retrieving any data.

Find out the drive manufacturer and run their disk diagnostics utility, possibly available on a bootable CD that can be downloaded. EBCD (http://www.ebcd.pcministry.com/) is one of them. Most can be downloaded from the manufacturer's website too.

[Sylvander]

I'm finding a lot of threads out there where this problem is caused by windows looking for a removable disk in a drive [e.g. zip drive], but the disk has been removed.
Windows may be looking for that because of...
1. The "Path" "Environment Variable" includes a location on the removable drive.
[Remove the path variable, or put the disk in the drive]
Or...
2. A shortcut in a "Recent" folder points to something on the removable drive.
[Delete the shortcut]

I previously found an MS KB article fix, but can't find it now. :(

See NTVDM Error: There Is No Disk in the Drive (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/102418/en-us)
And...
"There Is No Disk in the Drive. Please Insert a Disk into Drive \Device\harddisk\Dr1" Error Message When You Start Your Computer (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330137)