Drive Wont Boot

Hi all,

All of a sudden an IDE drive of mine wont boot.

The mainboard is an AOpen MX46-533V.

The drive shows up in BIOS fine and when I set to boot off C: in BIOS all that happens is Disk Boot Error after lines of random code starting with SiS900 PXE BootROM v1.09 Hook Int18

Ive Googled this and it seems to be trying to boot from Network.

Ive booted from Windows CD and went to repair install but it didnt find any previous versions of Windows installed. It saw the drive fine and the amount of disc space used but no Windows installation.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Most likely drive has corrupted which may be a sign of drive failure or could be just random corruption.

If you don't have data on the drive you can just reformat and try re-installing, otherwise:

Ideally try drive in another computer to see if contents are readable by another machine.

If it can be read by another computer then drive controller or cable fault.

Simple things first though so try switching cables just in case, then try in another computer.

If you have a second drive in the machine try installing windows there and seeing if you can read off the affected drive.

Thanks for the replies,

Just an update, I plugged the drive into another machine as a slave drive and was able to get all my data off it no problems.

I then put the drive back into its original system and went to format and did a clean Windows install. Everything went fine until the computer goes to restart after copying across the Windows files.

When the computer goes to boot up to start the next stage of the Windows installation it stalls at the start, same as before, same error.

Any ideas?