Question: I've added a new hard drive to my PC and now it won't boot up. I get the following message:

Disk Boot Failure, Insert System Disk and Press Enter

Since the drive is a SATA drive (so no jumpers of cable issues to deal with) and the existing C: drive left in place, I was expecting this to be an easy upgrade!  Both drive show up at the beginning when booting up.  Any ideas????

The problem here is that your system is trying to boot up off the wrong drive and it's this that is giving you the error message. 

Try rebooting your system and as it's starting up look at the bottom of the screen.  Chances are that you'll see a message that says that to enter setup press DEL and to press F8 for the boot menu (BIOSes vary but there are the most common keys).  Hit F8 and enter the boot menu and then select one of the drives to boot from and see if that works.  If not, repeat the process but this time choosing the other drive.  When your system boots up normally, you know which drive is your boot drive.

But you're not done yet.  You now need to change the drive that the PC is looking at to boot up.  To do this you need to enter the BIOS by pressing DEL (or the appropriate key) at bootup.  Once in the BIOS you need to look for settings related to boot up (this is where having the manual for the motherboard comes in handy ... you might want to search for it online if you don't have it).  On my particular system I choose the BOOT screen and then choose Hard disk Drives and then use the + and - keys to change the boot order.  After making the changes you need to save the BIOS settings and exit and then reboot.

Sorry I can't be of more help to you regarding BIOS settings but they vary considerably from one PC to another.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 17:05 and is filed under Questions from Visitors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.