[Greany1210]

A few days ago my pc suddenly displayed a ''disc boot failure, please insert system disc'' message on the black screen, tried a few things but no joy inclduing trying to instal vista again but it did not recognise any hd ..so i decided the hd must have died and ordered a new one with a new cable just in case it was that (the smaller cable only) anyway i fitted the new hard drive which is way above my pc knowledge, booted the pc up and same message appeared (disc boot failure) so i put the windows disc in and it proceeded to instal vista just fine (i did nothing other put the vista disc in , no format etc nothing) installs fine and works like a dream for about 24 hours but then i go out for a bit and the pc must have crashed or restarted and the dreaded boot disc message was back and from there on in wont do any anything when i try and install windows just says it cant find the hd

any ideas people???

some specs pc is a mesh 4 year old roughly old hd was a maxtor sata150 300gb sata new one is a wd sata11 500gb

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Since it's happened again with a new HD I would suspect the motherboard has a fault, in particular the SATA controller or port, probably an intermittent fault but that's just as bad as a permanent fault in practice.

Does it have a spare SATA port you can plug the drive into perhaps, too see what happens, if only for testing purposes?

[phillipcorcoran]

Since it's happened again with a new HD I would suspect the motherboard has a fault, in particular the SATA controller or port, probably an intermittent fault but that's just as bad as a permanent fault in practice.

Does it have a spare SATA port you can plug the drive into perhaps, too see what happens, if only for testing purposes?

[Greany1210]

Since it's happened again with a new HD I would suspect the motherboard has a fault, in particular the SATA controller or port, probably an intermittent fault but that's just as bad as a permanent fault in practice.

Does it have a spare SATA port you can plug the drive into perhaps, too see what happens, if only for testing purposes?

thanks for the reply

there is 4 sata ports on the motherboard and have tried 3 of them with no joy..there is also 4 others which say sata raid