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I just built a computer, an ASUS board P4S800, Pentium 4 2.8gHz, WD80gb HD,512mb RAM, Lite on Combo drive, Antec Case, ATI Radeon 9600, 56k modem. Ok the computer works great with one glitch, from a cold start it goes through post and looks like it will start up but then says insert boot disk or modify boot settings. I can restart it and Windows XP will then be booted and everything is fine. I believe this could have happened with the installation of the modem but still I am not sure and have tried changing bios boot preferences. This has no bearing because whatever I put, restore default, etc. the restart causes XP to load fine. Please, if anyone could contribute I would appreciate.

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Dani AI

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— the classic cold-boot-then-warm-boot-success symptom usually means the BIOS or hardware is not seeing the system disk reliably on a cold spin-up rather than Windows itself being wrong. Common root causes are drive spin-up/power or signal issues, master/slave or cable placement on PATA systems, on-board RAID/IDE mode confusion, marginal PSU behavior on cold start, or occasionally a corrupted boot sector that only becomes reachable after a warm POST.

Quick, prioritized checks and fixes (in order):

  • Observe BIOS on a cold power-on. If the hard drive is NOT listed in BIOS until after a restart, treat it as hardware detection: reseat/replace the data cable, try a different power connector, and move the drive to the primary connector (or a different port). For PATA, verify the jumper is set correctly (master/slave/cable-select) and try the HDD alone on the primary ribbon with the optical drive disconnected.
  • If BIOS DOES see the drive on cold boot but Windows still reports no bootable device, repair the boot structures from the XP Recovery Console. Useful commands (run from the Recovery Console):
fixmbr
fixboot c:
chkdsk c: /f /r
bootcfg /rebuild

Run these with caution and back up important data first; fixmbr changes the MBR.

  • If the motherboard RAID/IDE mode is set to RAID but no array exists, the controller can hide the disk until drivers load. If not using RAID, switch the controller to ATA/legacy/IDE mode in BIOS and install the correct drivers. If RAID is intended, confirm the array and boot device in the RAID BIOS.

  • Address BIOS/firmware and power issues: load optimized defaults, disable any overclocking settings (the reported overclock message suggests BIOS is reverting/settings unstable), replace the CMOS battery if settings shift, and consider testing with a known-good PSU. Updating the motherboard BIOS to the latest stable release can also fix cold-detection bugs.

If these steps do not resolve the cold-boot failure, the problem is most likely hardware (cabling, power rail, motherboard controller). A full XP reinstall will repair software corruption but will not fix a drive-detection or PSU/BIOS problem.

Member Avatar for Billj12901

I am also getting a overclock error from some cold boots but most of the time it says 'insert bootable disk or restart to boot' So I am still trying to work this out so please drop a line with some thoughts

Member Avatar for Billj12901

Another update, I took out modem and software for said modem and tried again but no problem. Found a system error with the raid drivers but just loaded the drivers for the raid software and that conflict was gone. I am not sure what repair command I should try with windows xp pro, If i should use bootfix or something else. My only other recourse before tearing down and rebuilding is to reload Windows XP Pro completely which would not be that difficult. Please give me some idea, since I believe I am doing this by the book, is there anything I am missing.

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