Hello everyone, I have a four year old pc which was working fine. Few days back it kept on looping in the energy certificate page,so I decided to do a repair install. Earlier I was working with Windows XP Home, and did the repair install from XP SP2 CD. The repair went fine and no data was lost. Then after two days as I restarted the pc, it gave me the error 'Disk Boot Failure.Insert System Disk'.. unable to understand what went wrong I again tried to repair install from the same CD but this time it showed no Windows on C drive and a completly unpartitioned disk of 76GB. Looking at the situation I thought of going for a complete format and installing windows from xp sp2 cd, but here is where i m facing the problem. After completing the first part of install, that is copying certain files,and shutting down, the next part never begins(the Windows logo never comes up) and the entire installation process is repeated again. I put my hard disk in a freinds pc as slave, and there it was detected as formatted,so i think the hard disk is ok. I also tried installing with the ram sticks one at a time in different slots,but to no avail. I have disconnected all the extra hardware,have slowed down my dram clock to 133mhz,and tried taking out the cd after first half of installation,then it again says disk boot failure,insert system disk. There is one more thing, the 'press any key to boot from cd' option never comes on screen. Boot order is set to hdd, hdd,cd-rom. I am unable to understand where the problem lies..is it mobo,or ram or ide cable...plz help (one more thing..lately my pc had to face a lot of sudden shutdowns..due to faulty ups..now the ups is ok..bt pc is dead :( specs are: samsung ide hard disk 80gb amd athlon 2600+ processor asus motherboard 2 ram sticks, 128mb and 256mb

1. bios is detecting the hrd disk as primary master 2. on going to recovery console..it says invalid file path for any command

To use the Boot from CD option, you have to set the cdrom as the first boot preference. You have it set to HDD. Set it to CDROM then HDD. Make sure to save it before you exit the bios. Keep Smiling It makes them think you're up to something...

As grasshopper stated, you need to set the CD-rom to be the first boot device. I've run into problems a number of times, when installing on an existing partition. Deleting the partition and creating a new one usually solves the problem. It seems that just formatting (with the Windows XP disc) doesn't always remove all traces of data from the partition. Please let us know if you found someone's advice to be helpful.

thanx a lot grasshopper and sci-guy...ne suggestion in these trying times seems a relief.. i forgot to mention..i was earlier having the first boot preference as cd-rom,then hdd.. but the pc keeps on booting from cd-rom..irrespective of whether i put cdrom or hdd as first boot device... earlier..first boot preference was cdrom,then hdd...it used to ask 'press any key to boot from cd'. First time I would press the key to start booting frmo cdrom,and after restart i would not press any key on this prompt...still it would boot from cd..that is why i completely removed cdrom as a boot preference..but still it boots from cdrom..and the loop continues... as sci-guy says about deleting any partition and recreating it from scrath, i have tried that as well..set up shows my hard disk as one complete unformatted partition of 76 gb.. if i press d to delete this partition , nothing happens as it is already unformatted raw partition of 76gb, if i create a partition by pressing c and entering the size, then too the install loop continues, that is after set up copies initial files and restarts, it repeats the entire process again..instead of showing the windows logo...plz help..i m fed up of this..

Bear with me, your problem is peculiar, but do you have any spare RAM of the correct type laying around that you could put into this PC? It sounds like both sticks might be bad, but don't hold me to that. You might also ought to download and run a hard disk diagnostic program for the hard disk from its manufacturer because hard disks tend to go out sporadically. If the earth was created by a big bang, how come my car or computer or anything else isn't created the same way?