Disk Boot Failure. Urgent Help needed !

[Dark Star]

Hi Al
I was trying to install PC-BSD that Digit provided Digit provided 2 ISO and the installation ended using 1'st Cd and the setup never asked for 2'nd Cd Also after that my grub got removed and I tried restoring grub and I was successful but after system boot I got same error every time.. I tried installaing different OS like Mint , Suse 10.3 , Ubuntu 7.0 but none of these OS grub is appearing while the grub gets installed during Installation.. Whenever I tried to boot the system Says "Disk Boot Failure " Please insert System disk to boot

What to do ? Please let me know asap. .Currently using Live Cd of Mint

Regards

 

[Pat]

^^Prolly BSD changed your partition table! Take a look at your grub config and make sure its booting into the right partition! Also check the health of your partitions!

 

[Dark Star]

^^ No it didn't I checked the partition table and stage1 file location and its correct ..

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        1275    10241248+  55  EZ-Drive
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2            1276        6949    45576405    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda3            6953        9729    22306252+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda5            1276        3825    20482843+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6            3826        6757    23551258+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda7            6758        6949     1542208+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

/dev/hd6 is not getting formatted to NTFS while using Gparted from Mint Cd

 

[Dark Star]

Curse all .. Nobody there to help

 

[infra_red_dude]

1) The hard disk is not detected.

2) The boot record has been wiped out.

3) The BIOS is looking elsewhere for boot record and not finding it (for e.g. boot off HDD has been disabled hence it looks for floppy/usb/dvd drive but doesn't find any bootable disk in either of them).

There can be no other reason for a Disk boot failure after the BIOS Post.

 

[mehulved]

I believe the boot partition needs to be marked active. I had faced a similar problem once prolly after using BSD only. Just try that out.

 

[infra_red_dude]

^^^ Oops! Yeah, missed that point.

And also if you haf 2 HDDs and the other one has an active partition but no boot record and BIOS is set to boot from that HDD first.

 

[mehulved]

Another couple of reasons I have come across is when the hard disk is not the first boot device. Then sometimes it does give such an error but not always.
Another time I faced a similar problem was when the SATA cable had come loose.
But, I strongly put my doubts on the problem I mentioned in the previous post.

 

[Dark Star]

See I find out this.. Linux partition editors detect it correctly I used Windows Cd and its didn't show any of the partition and asked me to format the partitions ? Whats should be done

 

[praka123]

try in ubuntu livecd, "sudo fdisk /dev/sda" and press "x" to go to expert option;press "f" ;then "v" and lastly press "w" and exit.run "partprobe" for instant changes.
Hope this can fix! (make sure,u dont mount any partitions in livecd)

and google says that the partition error u saw is a util-linux package bug.
*stason.org/TULARC/os/linux-faq/151-fdisk-Partition-1-does-not-start-on-cylinder-boundary.html

...and if u have any free space left on /dev/sda1,try resizing to a smaller size hence making some free space and fixing it via gparted from a livecd.now see fdisk -l to make sure the error message is not there.then again boot livecd and increase /dev/sda1 to its full space.

 

[Dark Star]

^^ Didn't worked It said using new Partition table but nothing happened

 

[praka123]

i read that "testdisk" utility even can fix.and the last soltn is to format and fix partitions

 

[mehulved]

Have you seen if the boot partition is active? I believe I had used cfdisk for it. But, even gparted should work.