How to diagnose a “Disk Error Press any key to restart” after blue screen in XP

Question

I have had a couple of Blue Screens of Death (BSOD) lately and after the last one I got the disk error message.

The disk shows up during the BIOS portion of the boot. It is in a Dell Precision 690 so the F12 key gives me a boot menu.

I can boot from the utility partition, and if I specifically select the hard drive from the boot menu it will boot fine.

Any ideas why if I just try to do an unattended boot, it give this error?

"Disk Error Press any key to restart"

Answer 1

Ok, it was solved but I want to post what happened in case someone can add details that may help someone else who stop by here.

Obviously BIOS settings aren't something you change on a regular basis and I'm not saying this is related to the BSOD. Simple facts, I have a BSOD, it won't reboot, I get the disk error listed in the quesion, I change a setting in the BIOS and it boots fine.

Problems are that in the first place I'm not sure what the setting actually does or why it fixed the problem, and second I don't know if it will introduce new problems.

Setting in question was changing "SATA Operation" from AHCI to ATA.
Any comments?

Answer 2

Try changing disk pre-delay in bios to a longer time...it has been an issue for me before but it has been a while. My problem was specifically large disks taking longer to spool than the bios expected and a simple ctl-alt-del fixed it, but this was not okay for unattended restarts.

Answer 3

I've read the wiki entry for AHCI and I'm still no wiser other than it is only fully supported from Vista onwards. This link gives a decent explanation as to why you would have experienced the problems you did (paragraph 4). http://www.differencebetween.net/technology/difference-between-ahci-and-sata/

As to why you had to change your BIOS? It may be your battery is on the way out or it got jarred and reverted you to the default settings? Just a guess.