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Is my PC's hard disk drive dying? - A constant "disk boot failure" error message appears at startup that only a shutdown and reboot can fix

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Hard disk drive problem: Disk boot failure message comes up constantly at startup, but not after a shutdown and reboot

My new HP desktop PC runs Windows 7 Home Premium. It is giving me a "disk boot failure" error message each day when I try to boot it up. What does this mean exactly? It appears, with rare exceptions, only when the PC is started each morning. Once or twice in the six weeks since I purchased the computer, the error did not appear. If I shut the PC down and restart it, everything appears to run properly. I've run software diagnostic tests on all the hardware, followed the recommendations on the HP website to correct this error, run chkdsk and talked to HP tech support. The only course of action left is to wipe my hard drive and run the HP system recovery CD. Before doing that, I need to know if there is anything else I can try.

Answer

Since your PC is still under warranty, you could insist that the seller gets it fixed for you or replaces it. However, if you don't want the hassle that is always involved, here are some simple measures to take to resolve the issue:

I have seen quite a few problems with the older IDE 40-pin hard-drive cables, and the new SATA hard-drive cables. Their fragile-looking connectors look like a potential cause of problems such as yours. These cables are very cheap, and, although HP should fix it all under warranty, the hassle often is not worth it. If you can replace the hard disk drive's data cable, you will save yourself all the hassle of having to reload all of your data and programs again.

I found this answer on the Internet that provides the most likely solution:

"I had a problem similar to yours, did a lot of digging on Google and got lots of advice, ran a bunch of diagnostics and could not find any problems. I thought my hard drive was ready to fail, so I looked into replacing it. But I happened to have a spare SATA cable lying around, and for the heck of it tried replacing the cable. Since then, I've had no problems! My advice - before you buy a new hard drive, buy a replacement cable and see if that makes a difference. You might save yourself lots of $$$, like I did!"

Your action plan should be:

1. - Save/backup your email, documents and pictures, and music.

2. - Don't bother trying to backup your programs, because they usually need to be installed, not just copied back.

3. - Unplug the AC mains cable so the computer is not powered on. Replace the hard drive cable, or, at least, unplug it and then re-plug it. If you have an IDE hard drive and the power supply unit has a spare 4-pin Molex power lead (with yellow, black, black, red), then unplug the power connector from the hard drive and swap it. An SATA drive uses an SATA power cable or a four-pin Molex cable with an a SATA adapter cable attached to it. If there is no replacement available then unplug and re-plug the drive's power connector.

If doing that doesn't work, you could try running the hard-drive diagnostic utility that is provided by the drive's manufacturer. You should be able to identify the manufacturer by entering devmgmt.msc in the Start => Run box in Windows XP and in the Start => Start Search box in Windows Vista. That command brings up the Device Manager. Look under the Disk drives category by clicking on the + beside it.

If the hard disk drive is shown to be failing, make copies to recordable CD/DVDs of everything that you want to save, and then go through the process involved that will get your PC fixed by its manufacturer under its warranty.

Where to download the hard-disk-drive diagnostic utilities for a particular major make of hard drive

MHDD is the most popular freeware program for low-level hard-disk-drive diagnostics. -

http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

Seagate - SeaTools -

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

Note that Maxtor and Quantum hard drives use SeaTools (above).

Western Digital - Data Lifeguard - http://support.wdc.com/download/

Hitachi/IBM - Drive Fitness Test -

http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/

Links checked: Jan. 29 2012. - Note well that if such a utility is used on a faulty system (suffering from bad RAM memory, an inadequate power supply unit, a faulty motherboard, etc.) it could produce unreliable results.