When I boot my machine cold, I get a disk boot failure message. If I immediately shut down and restart, I get the same message, however if I leave machine on for about three to four minutes when getting the message and then shut down and restart, the machine boots right up. Can someone help me diagnose this problem and give me a remedy to fix. In other words, if the machine has been on several minutes and warmed up, I don't get this message. I have run a complete virus scan with no problems and my bood sequence in my bios is setup correctly. Problem has just recently started. Could a CMOS Battery or the Power Supply be the cause of this problem? Thanks much!

what is the exactly message? i seem to have encountered this problem before

XP Home Edition
AMD 1.2
56X CD-Rom Drive
384MB Ram
CD8 CD-RW Drive
Primary 40GB HD

Sounds to me like your hard disk is about to pack up if it will only boot when you've warmed it up for a few minutes.

Before you do anything else, back up all of your documents and important data onto CDR.

Then run a Scandisk using the 'Thorough' option (does Scandisk still exist in Windows XP?) in order to scan your drive for bad sectors.

I doubt that this is a battery / PSU problem.

Thanks DJ for your input. My HD is only three months old and I was just ready to leave to visit the computer repair shop who installed it. I really appreciate your input!

Bob

No problem - let us know if they sort it out

DJ: Went to PC Repair only to find them out of business. Have run a thorough disk scan using Norton Disk Doctor and it appears I have no problem with the HD. There are no bad sectors or anything negative in the scan. Do you have any other possible remedies to check? Thanks again!

Bob

I have this IBM thinkpad 600 that's started to give me this stupid problem. I trie dto turn it up and i got this error message at first : 11 301 error.
I found out from a little research on the net that it's a keyboard error.probably a stuck key.
i tried to find the hexadecimal equivalent of the 11 in front of the 301.i thought it's the D key on my laptop..i took it out, cleaned it and still the same problem.
Then i found out that some of the special keys might be the problem..keys like ctrl, alt, del and the rest, i open them and cleaned the keys..
Also , does anyone knows what key is key number 17 on the keyboard...since 11 in hex = 17 decimal

dalguy4ever: I believe your problem is a bit different than mine, but thanks for giving me your input. Thanks!

Bob

Dalguy4ever - if you need some help with this, could you post a new thread rather than a reply to this thread - then we'll be able to deal with it separately. Thanks

Rkralowetz - I don't know how experienced you are with PCs but, if it was me, I would swap my hard disks around, making the 30Gb hard disk the secondary drive and then doing a quick Windows XP install on the 60Gb disk and booting off of that. If the system boots but you can't consistently get to the data on the 30Gb drive, then that would definitely suggest that it's a faulty drive that needs to be replaced.

I can't think what else it could be other than that ... apart from, maybe, a funny power problem as you've got quite a bit of kit inside your system. What's the power rating on the PSU?