IDing source of error message 1 in MS article 314477

[bix]

I left my PC on last night. This morning when I got up, the monitor light was blinking as if the PC was off or it was acting as a screensaver. Nothing would bring it out of this state, so I rebooted and got this error message:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314477

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.

Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

The BIOS sees all drives normally at boot.

After a few reboots, it persisted. I used an Ubuntu livecd to investigate, and while it saw all of my drives, it couldn't mount either hard drive (one IDE, one SATA). I popped in my Windows XP CD to see if I could try a repair, but it couldn't see my boot drive (the SATA drive). I rebooted again without anything in the optical drives, and this time XP booted normally and I'm using it now, but I'm guessing that in some form, my computer is not long for this world.

Since I didn't perform any of the suggested fixes, I'm guessing that it's the dreaded "General hardware failure." Given that at one point 2 hard drives on different controllers weren't working problem, my best guess would be that the motherboard is borked. Anyone have a better idea so I can hopefully fix this with as little expense as possible?

Thanks!
-David

 

[GhislainG]

Did you clear the CMOS after the problem occurred? Is it possible that your system might have been in sleep mode and never recovered from it? I had to reconfigure on one of my systems; otherwise it just wouldn't get out of sleep mode.

 

[bix]

Haven't tried that but I dunno if I should. My PC is not set to sleep automatically.

It happened again later and then after I left it turned it off overnight, it booted normally in the morning. So the cycle is repeating...

 

[GhislainG]

If you leave the system idle for long enough, do you have the issue or does it also occur while using it?

 

[bix]

So far the monitor blinking occurs while idle.

 

[GhislainG]

Then the system goes into some energy saving mode.

 

[bix]

So what keeps me from waking it up and then causes the intermittent error message?

 

[GhislainG]

That's difficult to answer. You're the only one who knows what hardware you have and what software was installed. Is the BIOS configured correctly for Windows XP?

 

[bix]

Could you define "configured correctly for Windows XP"? Thanks!

 

[GhislainG]

You're the only one who knows what your motherboard is and how you configured Suspend Mode, ACPI, APM, etc. in the BIOS. Not all options necessarily are compatible with Windows XP.

 

[Zoron]

Disable all sleep modes in BIOS and Windows. Windows can at times override the BIOS settings and this may be where the problem lies.