Short story
Machine boots to Boot Failure System Halted if you shut it down before powering it up. Restarts are dandy. Shut downs, well, not so dandy.
Long Story
I’m working on a Dell Dimension 4400, XP Home Edition, 128 MB RAM, Pentium 4 1.6GHz. When the machine was first brought to me, it booted to Boot Failure: System Halted, after briefly --and I do mean briefly, if you’d blinked you’d have missed it-- displaying the Dell splash screen.
After trying many things, I booted to the Recovery Console from an XP CD only to have it tell me it there was no hard drive installed. The system restarted, I removed the CD and, miracle of miracles, it booted to XP just fine. I did what I needed to do which required several restarts and all went swimmingly. I shut down yesterday evening and when I powered the machine on this morning, bam, right to Boot Failure: System Halted. Once again, I boot from the CD, this time not even bothering to go to the Recovery Console, just aborting the XP install, the machine reboots, I remove the CD and get into Windows just fine.
What the heck is going on here? I’m sure I could figure this out by myself but I’ve got to give this machine back in less than three hours and having this user boot from the CD every time she shuts down isn’t very pretty.
Try going into the BIOS (on a Dell you may have to hold down a key other than DEL) and look for an option similar to “quick boot”. Disable that option and see what happens. Occasionally, allowing cranky hardware a few extra seconds to warm up will allow it to be ready for duty when the motherboard requests it.
While you’re in the BIOS, tell it to auto-detect your drives and see if it’s having any trouble doing that, and ensure that your boot devices are in the right order.
Last possibility on my mind is that your motherboard’s CMOS battery is dead or shorted, so it’s resetting your BIOS configurations and re-ordering your boot devices.
This could mean that your hard drive is starting to go south. I’m guessing that the drive motor is starting to die, and the hard drive takes longer to spin up than it used to, which means that it is no longer always ready when the computer starts asking it for data. Hence, the computer can’t find the drive unless you give it a little longer to boot up (by disabling quick boot). Eventually the motor will get so bad that it won’t properly spin the platters, and at that point it’s time for a new drive.
This can also happen with a faulty or loose power connector. If the problem persists, try completely unplugging and firmly reseating the HDD power connector (with the computer off, of course) Better yet, solve both possibilities by plugging a currently unused power connector into the drive instead, if you have one.
One problem with loose or intermittent connections is that they often appear to clear up for a while after you fiddlearound inside the case. Also, unlike a wall plug, which holds the plug by mechanically engaging the conductor prongs, a HDD power plug engages the socket via a friction fit on the outside of the plug, so it can feel tight or snug even if it doesn’t make a good electrical connection.
HDD power connectors are cheaply constructed, and are especially prone to damage if yanked out by the wires at any point in their history (e.g. at the factory/shop)
I firmly reseated all the cables first, actually. I assumed the machine was just rattling around in her trunk, and, as it turns out, I was right.
engineer_comp_geek, you’re probably right. It ain’t my machine. I was just doing a colleague’s relative a favor. I will mention it to her on Monday, though.