disk boot fail with brand new HD

[jocke_x1]

hi,first a litte backstory to my problem

my last HD broke a couple of weeks ago, i got the message "no boot device available". the HD was a couple of years old and i've been getting the
"disk boot failure" message from time to time with it. but everytime i've been able to get it to work by just checking the cables or waiting a few days.
but this time i handed it in to a shop who told me i had to replace the HD. so I had them put in a new one and everything was ok for like two weeks.

now to the issue.
First i got the "disk boot fail" rebooted and it worked.
but i noticed the computer was realy slow and it crashed. after reboot and some more crashes i got three differnt BSOD's:

one without any real info(or i dindn't pay attention to the first one),
one with a mention of ati3duag.dll,
and one "with kernel stack inpage error"

now i get the "disk boot failure" on every startup, i've noticed the fan dies down right before and I'm wondering if i might have a faulty power supply.

anyone have another suggestion or recognise the BSOD's?

[cauzomb]

If you have another power supply to test your theory, some of the most common random PC issues are heat, bad drivers, bad PSU. please post your full system specs; PC make/model, bios version, CPU type, speed, hard disk size, empty/full percent.. amount of Random access memory, what type of RAM, DDR/DDR2, videocard type/agp/pci-e, make model.. obviously, an ATI based on the error you mentioned above, and what opperating system?

If you keep getting the disk boot error, make sure that your main boot disk is set to the first boot device/hard disk boot priority. If you can get into windows, to troubleshoot the BSOD, open the control panel, open system, select the "advanced" tab, then in startup and recovery, uncheck automatically restart. This way you have the BSOD on the screen long enough to copy down the exact error message and code's and memory range. If you can get the error message/s copied down, post them up here, along with the rest of your system information.

[jocke_x1]

my pc is a Fujitsu/Siemens with

BIOS ver:
FUJITSU SIEMENS A8NE-FM 1011
06/06/2006 (devils computer lol )

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+
2.21 Ghz

HD(master)
300 GB 23% (70 GB)empty

HD(slave)
230 GB 8% (2 GB) empty


1024 MB DDR RAM

ATI Radeon X1800
PCI -Express

Windows XP
SP 3

since my last post i opened it up and secured the cables and now it's been starting agian for some days. I havent had any BSOD's but it's frozen a few times
when streaming video or in screensaver mode.

i'm afraid i dont have an PSU i can test with, do you know of any application that can monitor the total voltage drain or something like that?

[cauzomb]

There are a few applications that can monitor the onboard sensors of the motherboard, if the board has the sensors and the application supports your motherboard. Some of the applications can be inaccurate. Look for Motherboard monitor ~monitors temperatures, shows CPU speed, fan speed and various voltages.. GPUZ ~can monitor the videocard voltage/amperage and GPU component temperatures, CPUZ ~can monitor the CPU temp and voltages and show information about the frequency/clock multiplier, ram timings etc..


looks like a healthy machine, free space on C: 23%? is that the same disk that contains the swap/page file? have you tried setting a fixed swapfile size? say 1.5 times the total system ram? if you have 1024, you'd set the swap file/page file size to 1536MB minimum and 1536MB maximum.. I use 3072/3072 on my systems that have 1GB to 2GB ram. It helps keep the page file from changing size on the fly, preventing the hard drive from becoming fragmented, also preventing the pagefile from freeking out and loosing data when windows changes the size durring a memory hungry opperation..

Clean any dust off of the CPU and video card heatsink's.

Perhaps there was a dodgy cable or connection. A small break in a cable could have a good connection while held/bent in one direction, and disconnected by bending/moving the cable in the other direction.. If you notice that you get bsod's while moving a power plug wires, check the inside of the plugs to make sure that the barrel connectors are not spread out too far to make good contact, if it BSOD's when you move a data cable, best to just replace those.
I'm glad that you are not getting the BSOD's anymore.

I don't know what to say about the freezing issue, maybe a power save mode/driver issue, or flaky videocard driver.