Boot up...

[stefanus]

A friend of mine has the problem below. Hope help is available for him. Thank you in advance!


We have two video editing machines. They both use, legal versions of Windows XP and Adobe Premiere Pro. They normally work well, without a fuss. They never connect with the internet.

One went a bit haywire, last week. It now only wants to boot up using the Windows XP CD. I have tried setting it back to the last known good configuration but it still wants to boot up with the Windows CD. It runs through a series of checks, which look familiar. I don't know what they mean. It stops with the following message:

Verifying DMI Pool Data

Boot from CD

DISC BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISC AND PRESS ENTER



I could send it in to our local computer shop for repair but would like to avoid that expense, if possible.


Any suggestions would be welcome.

[Paul Komski]

Disk Boot Failure could well be what it says. A failed hard drive - preceded by some noticeable problems as it was developing the fault.

First see if the hard drive is detected in the BIOS setup. If not and that is still the case after you have checked all the connections it probably means that the drive is toast but do then try it in another PC to see if it can be recognised on another system.

If seen in the BIOS try booting to any utility floppy or CD that can see the partition structure. BiNG (in my sig) would do or fdisk on an MSDOS boot floppy or GParted or the HDD maker's own diagnsotic utility. If the hard drive and its partitions can be seen check that the correct partition is marked as active. If the hard drive cannot be identifed by such methods then the only question that remains is whether data recovery is of relevance or not. If not then get a new hard drive and clean install the OS etc etc.

[stefanus]

Thanks Paul!

I will inform my friend, he lives in Capetown, and give him this info.