I love Indian cuisine, but apparently that is not enough to prevent fate from condemning my computer, or at least parts of it, to unprovoked, mysterious attacks!
My computer is a personal custom build of supercharged, game fraggin’, speed demon parts, at least as far as November 2007 is concerned. One of these parts is of course the primary hard drive on which I install my main operating system (Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit). It is a Western Digital ‘Raptor’ drive, which essentially means it spins and thus reads/writes data really fast. Well a few months ago I started getting a “Disk boot failure” error (before booting into Windows), which is generally a very bad thing. This was after having installed Ubuntu Linux on one of my additional hard drives. Installing Ubuntu causes a program called ‘GRUB’ to be installed on the primary boot drive which basically presents you with a menu that gives you the option to boot into Windows, Linux or what not. I was able to find a temporary workaround for the problem by simply putting my Windows disc in the drive, letting it get detected but not booted, and magically all would go fine again until I restarted. Obviously I wasn’t satisfied with a gimpy fix like this and so I asked the great oracle of all knowledge, Google search, for an answer. The results came up rather skewed, full of similar situations but nothing quite the same. Whilst still searching though I was reminded of a better fix by pressing ‘F2′ after the BIOS check and in the manual boot menu I could choose to boot from my primary hard drive, and therefore get into GRUB successfully. This was still kind of annoying, but on the bright side, I could view it as a custom security feature! Other attempts at a permanent fix (updated motherboard BIOS, new SATA controller drivers, etc.) proved fruitless.
Experience convinced me that I just needed a fresh install of Windows to clear things up. Luckily I place all of my important data on a third internal storage drive of one terabyte so that anytime my boot drive gets screwed everything is safe on my passive giant of a storage hard drive. The reinstall of Windows went quick enough, and all was good for a few weeks until I decided to install Ubuntu again. After a few days of Windows and Linux dual-booting bliss I was again confronted by my old enemy, the ominous black screen of boot failure (immediately preceded by a most disconcerting sound of boot attempt failure). For a moment I believed I had somehow offended Monkeyman to the point that he had sent his band of ninja monkeys to sabotage my machinery. Once again I journeyed to the wilds of the internet to seek the guidance of the great Google. This time I was favored from on high. Within some random messageboard I read about hints of an obscure boot priority menu in the BIOS that is similar yet different from the boot order menu. I checked my own menu and found that my boot drive had somehow been moved to third priority and that every time my PC was trying to boot from the second or third drive (thanks GRUB). I switched it back the first and, lo and behold, the heavens opened and I was back in business, dual-booting and all. Or so I thought.
Yes all was good for a few weeks, until this very morning when I turned my beautiful PC on and the boot failure returned, but this time the main drive was not even detected in the BIOS (very bad juju)! After that I went hardcore, opened up my case, completely cleaned and dusted it out, reconnected the appropriate cables, and tried to set things in order. Same problem. So I switched around the data and power cables to see if something other than the drive was at fault, but no matter what combo I did, the other two SATA optical and hard drives would be detected but the main one not. I was left with no choice but to declare my Raptor drive dead on the scene. The one benefit of shelling out for the Raptor drive in the first place was that it comes with a phat five-year warranty. I called them up and a replacement is on the way, and in the meantime I am having to boot into Linux from its install CD and use it that way! This is somewhat annoying since I no settings can be saved once I restart the computer, but it is better than nothing!
The moral of this story is, if you take the trouble to build and maintain your own computer, be sure to get a good warranty on the components!
Posted by N. Palmer 
