boot disk failure

[hairfly]

I disconnected my hard drive in my pc. Then, I installed TIVO's hard drive to the secondary master and a new hard drive to the primary slave in order to temporarily backup the TIVO drive to the new hard drive. I followed Hinsdale's guide and used PTVUpgrade CD 4.01 to do the backup. Backup was successful. Then, I needed to copy the backup image from the new hard drive to the original hard drive of my PC. I connected the original hard drive as primary master and the new hard drive with the TIVO backup image as primary slave. When I powered up my pc, I found the "boot disk failure" error.

The solution was to use XP CD to boot and then write mbr (fixmbr or fixboot) through restore console. This method works when I backup my TCD24004A TIVO. Then, I started backing up my second TIVO (TCD540040). This time, I tried the weakness CD. After backup, I had no problem to boot my pc using the original hard drive.

I decided to try PTVUpgrade CD again to see if the above-mentioned problem happened. It did happen. However, I failed to use the above method to fix the boot problem. It kept giving me the "boot disk failure" error. The intersting thing is that I could boot my PC when I put the XP CD in the CD-ROM and set the first boot to CD and second to HD (don't press any key in order not to boot to CD).

I tried to repair XP installation using XP CD. After that, I still got the "boot disk failure" error. My PC is down now. I appreciate any suggestion!

[Narf54321]

With all your drive swapping and such, you may have dislodged the IDE cable from your motherboard.

[hairfly]

I solved the problem. I connected my original hard drive and also inserted the weakness CD in CD-ROM in order to boot to CD. When weakness CD asks me to hit Enter, I removed my pc and then re-started my PC immediately. XP was back then. I am still not clear what happens to my pc. I only know that my pc doesn't like PTVUpgrade CD. But, Weakness CD is great to work with.