I am baffled, I have a Compaq Presario SR1403WM, It worked fine for 6 years. Then the power supply died. I replaced it. About 2 weeks later ( I thought) the hard drive crashed, On the screen was something like " boot failure insert boot disk"  so I did a full system restore with the restore disk that were made when I first GOT the computer.  This worked for a couple of weeks, then it crashed again,  so I bought a new hard drive, did a system restore, worked fine for awhile,  Then crashed again.  I did a hard drive check USING the diagnostic program from Western Digital, and it said all was working. When the drive crashed again, I went into the system to change the boot sequence BACK to boot from CD drive, and the computer booted into windows,  Then, it locked up so I had to reboot it,  came up with "boot failure" again. I bought a new SATA cable, thinking that might be the problem, but it still crashes. Some thing is causing the hard drive to stop running.  It has not been on the internet, since replacing the hard drive, so it can't be picking up a virus. There are no beeps, clicking sounds, or anything else I can think of to check. What can cause the "boot failure" to keep coming up?
Any thoughts  would be helpfulA number of things cause 'boot failure' on a system 6 years old.
1. The CMOS battery is bad. System loses settings.
2. Power cables to the Hard Drive are oxidized and wore. But you already checked that?
2.5  Dust has COLLECTED on the underside of the motherboard.
3. RAM chips have become unreliable.Or just oxidized.
4. The BIOS has become unstable. Doing na FLASH might help. Maybe.
5. Electrolytic Caps have become dry. Affects power quality.

That is not the whole list.


Why its crashing
1 bad connection
2. driver not known Quote from: kaleb122 on March 17, 2014, 03:12:23 PM

Why its crashing
1 bad connection
2. driver not known

Why its crashing
1 bad connection
2. driver not known