Drive Not Ready-System Halted
Babe Brown
I am running a dual boot Windows XP Pro/Windows 2000 on a
P4 1.5 machine w/ 760 MBs Rambus RAM and two HDs, one 40
Gig with w/ two active partitions containing the two
operating systems, and the other a 120 Gig Western
Digital used for storage only.
I have an error on boot that happens about one out of
every 10 startups, usually always from a cold boot. The
PC will not boot and instead displays the message "Drive
Not Ready-System Halted". I then reboot the machine and
it boots normally, defaulting to Windows XP unless I
choose differently.
I have done scan disk on all of the partitions, with no
problems found. I have run up-to-date Norton AV 2003 scan
on all partitions. I have defragged all. I am unable to
find the cause for this problem in all of my
troubleshooting and Google searches for that error
message.
Actually, having the boot up fail and having to start it
over again to then successfully boot occasionally is more
of a slight inconvenience than a "problem", but I am very
worried that this occurence is an indication that a drive
may be failing.
Thank you, in advance, for any help you may provide!
Regards, Babe
Nospam
Look in the Event Viewer under administrative tools and see if that provides
any clues.
Nospam
"Babe Brown" <Babe_...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:328f01c3245f$5aa79110$a401...@phx.gbl...
Antonio Remedios
> Actually, having the boot up fail and having to start it over again to
> then successfully boot occasionally is more of a slight inconvenience than
> a "problem", but I am very worried that this occurence is an indication
> that a drive may be failing.
If your drive is SMART compatible (and judging from their hugenesses, they
probably will be), then you could try running SMART diagnostics (say, from
http://www.kmint21.com/smart/ ). Of course, SMART only detects a proportion
of hard drive problems (albeit quite a high proportion - about 70% I think)
so if you're really worried, then you could always buy new hard drives and
give your old ones to me ;)
Ant :)
Babe Brown
No record of the error is reported in the Event Viewer.
Event Viewer shows no entries for today at all until
after I successfully booted into Windows XP, and then all
is reported as functioning as it should.
Thanks for your response!
Regards, Babe
Babe Brown
Thanks for your kind offer to unburden me with my HDs,
but they are both covered by warrantees. <<grin>>
Thanks also for your suggestion about the SMART diag
software. I have downloaded and after reading a bit about
it, I will probably give it a try.
Regards, Babe
Ant wrote:
>
>If your drive is SMART compatible (and judging from
their hugenesses, they
>probably will be), then you could try running SMART
diagnostics (say, from
>http://www.kmint21.com/smart/ ). Of course, SMART only
detects a proportion
>of hard drive problems (albeit quite a high proportion -
about 70% I think)
>so if you're really worried, then you could always buy
new hard drives and
>give your old ones to me ;)
>
>Ant :)
>.
>
Nospam
A hard drive problem may take time to exhibit itself in the event viewer; it
can take hours or a few days. I've had 3 Western Digital Hard Drives go bad
in one year and I've identified it each time in the event viwer. A
different problem each time too.
No more Western Digitals for me, btw.
Nospam
"Babe Brown" <Babe_...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:2e6101c32462$a8cfee20$a001...@phx.gbl...
Babe Brown
Well, this problem has been happening randomly for 2 or 3
months now. I use this system every day, from morning to
evening. Other than this random boot malfunction, nothing
seems amiss. Hmmmmmmmm! I am going to contact Western
Digital.
Thanks and Regards, Babe
>-----Original Message-----
>Babe,
>