"DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER."

I've been having this problem for a few days now (and doing personal research in addition to requests for help on EggXpert and Anandtech) and I was wondering if any users on Tom's could help me out with this issue.

I have the ASUS P5N-D motherboard and after installing Windows (and formatting all the drives) my computer tells me "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER."

So when this pops up, I found that if I leave the Windows XP CD in, it asks to boot from CD (which I just let it run without pressing enter) and Windows starts up normally. I changed the boot sequence so it goes HDD, CD, then REMOVABLE... but it didn't seem to solve anything.

I have 3x 250GB WD Caviars (all OEM from Newegg) and from what I've seen they read/write/function normally in Windows. Two of the HDDs are set in RAID 0 and in the boot sequence, this is the first HDD listed (with the backup being second).

I tried taking out hte battery on the MB and put it back in to reset the CMOS as has been suggested. Now instead of loading Windows while having the CD in, it loads the XP installation CD instead of the OS itself.

With no luck finding any solutions, I totally reformatted everything -- I deleted and reinstalled two of my HDDs and put them back in a RAID 0 setup and partitioned that setup to a C/D type of deal like before. Installed Windows and got the same issue.

This is really frustrating me because my roommate built the same exact build (except he's using the equivalent Seagate 250GB HDDs). He's thinking that it may be a problem with the HDDs, but so far it seems like all three of them are working fine. Again after reformatting, getting the same error, and putting the Windows XP CD back in... it loads Windows. Though this is nice... I'd like the system to start without having the CD in there.

I could really use the help as I dropped a good 1600+ on this system

Thanks guys! Any help is always appreciated.

Makes sense...

I am pretty new at this (this is my first home built system and most of my knowledge comes from the hours of research I put into each part before putting the build together) so could you tell me what I could do to check the raid controllers? Basically what my roommate did is copy the files that the ASUS drivers CD gave him and put it on a floppy. Worked flawlessly for him so this is why he thinks it's the actual HDDs.

Did you set the RAID partition as bootable in the RAID BIOS?
Sounds more like a configuration issue than an actual HW/SW issue. Also check that in the Motherboard BIOS you have the correct SATA drives set to be members of the RAID.

Try booting with only the OS HD in the system. Does it boot?

It's definitely not a boot order snafu and I am definitely booting from the RAID drive. I will, however, try to boot the OS HD without the backup HD first and see what happens.

Thanks for your help guys.

I had a few problems like this before, but it was my fault cuz i didnt check my jumpers on the cd drive and the hard drives, making sure they were set to cable select... wait, your using sata drives... hmm i dunno. soz

I also had the "Disk Boot Failure" message recently and that us what worked for me....I got my message after getting the BSOD while playing Supreme Commander...lol...I thought it was maybe because of my overclock but after countless tries to get back to windows I opened up my tower and mad5e sure everything was connected and that seemed to work

Tag because it's interesting

This is a late add, but other searchers may benefit:

I just went through all this today, while getting my disks setup to rebuild a RAID mirror. I had originally backed up my source drive with driveimage.xml (http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm). Then, to test my backup, restored that image to another drive, and when booting that drive got the "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER" message. -This was even after I set the new drive (where I restored to) to "active" in Disk Management.

What I discovered was, with all the drive switching around on my SATA ports, the BIOS was set to boot off the wrong SATA port. So you need to be sure that your boot order in BIOS matches the drive you actually want to boot from.

Then, I needed to rebuild the master boot record on that drive. Fortunately, I had a UBCD4Win disk around (http://www.ubcd4win.com/), but one could use a regular Windows Boot CD. I booted into recovery console and did a fixmbr on the drive, rebooted, and was good to go!

I've since installed the RAID card, installed the drivers, moved the drives to the RAID card, and am now in the process of rebuilding/resynching the mirror.

Weee! (This took me all of about a day)

Hope it helps someone...

Jay

Hey mate,

I just had the exact same problem. I have 1 150gb raptor with my os on it and a 500gb caviar(WD).

I was adding some new ram to my comp which didnt really work for some reason, so I changed back to my old ram, then I started getting the msg you described.

I realised that in the bios, the order of my hdd's had changed, so that my comp was trying to boot from the 500gb caviar which did not have an os on it, hence the error. So my advice is check your bios and make sure that it is booting from the raid hdds and not the other which doesn't have the os on it. Hope that solves the problem

I just got the dreaded 'disk boot error message' in a machine I built about six months ago. The mobo is an ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe running in a RAID 0+1 array. There are four SATA HDD's (320gb each) that were working perfectly the last time I powered it down. The next time I tried to boot the box, I got the boot error message. Running WinXP Pro w/ sp3 & 4gb of Corsair DDR2 ram...yes I know that XP Pro won't run all 4gb of the ram since I'm running it in x32 mode, but it uses somewhere around 3.5gb of it. I've tried clearing the CMOS, changing SATA cables & just about everything I've read on the net, but nothing changes. I can't even reload WinXP cuz it either gives the blue screen of death or just freezes when trying to reload. I looked in the BIOS & it recognizes all four drives in the correct 0+1 RAID array. Tried rebuilding the MBR to no avail. I know that a bad HDD could cause this, but the RAID array should still boot unless the OS is on the possibly defective drive. Does anyone have any ideas regarding what I should try next? Thanks in advance for any help!