The Case of the Phantom Disk

Late night, deep slumber. The phone rings—never a good sign. “Hello?” “Hi...can you help? My computer’s dead!” A relative calling from a thousand miles away, in a panic. “What’s the problem?” “Well, it won’t boot. All I get is this message on my screen...”

Disk boot failure - Insert system disk and press Enter

Ouch. None of our remote control tools are going to help with this one. We need someone there to look at it! Skip forward a week. An experienced tech guy has been on-site, working on the computer all day. It’s still not fixed. He calls for help. His report: After seven hours, he’s found that none of the usual issues for that message seem to apply:

• The hard disk is actually fine. No problem.
• Windows is properly installed. In fact, he wiped out everything on the disk and reinstalled Windows, but it still is not working properly.

Hmmm... father God, what do I ask this guy? A few more questions digging to learn something, anything... he gives an answer that sounds a bit strange to me...

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Tags: Inspired Debugging, System boot, Windows