I have a Northwood P4-1.8G, ABit BD-7A mainboard, 512M PC-2100 RAM, IBM 40GB Deskstar 120GXP HD, WinXP. Tonight, when re-booting (cold) for another reason, I noted that the IDE detect routine in POST took about 15 seconds, followed the message "Unable to find bootable disk" (or something similar)- it also offered the opportunity to boot from the DVD drive. I powered down to a cold boot again, and everything came up OK. What could cause this? (The faulty POST sequence went Ok up to the beep and CPU/memory data). I do have Boot Magic installed. Any ideas- I'm a little concerned about it happening again in a more permanent manner :)I also have doubts about the speed of the machine always being the same after a re-boot, but that could be my imagination.This machine is about 4 months old, and while I keep it on 24/7 unless I have a raeson to re-boot, I've never seen this before.Thanks.

I wouldn't worry unless you experience this more often. With all the spinning going on in your harddrive or lack of spinning if you shutdown the drives after no activity, it may have been that the drive just missed the info during your reboot. You could run a scandisk with surface scan to see if it can find any bad sectors. I would also defrag after you get a clean scan.

Thanks,I tried CTRL-ALT-DEL several times when in POST, re-booted but still no good. I had to actually power down and re-start to have effect. Not a nice feeling!I will take your advice, thanks.Bruce.

What happens when you do a Windows restart? Are you able to restart and have windows start and stabilize.

I just tried a WinXP re-start, and all went OK.Maybe just an isolated incident? I'm still confuesed why repeated CTRL-ALT-DEL sequences wouldn't cure this, but a total power-down and re-boot did.Thanks for the suggestions, much appreciated.Bruce.

Power-down is a cold boot. It by necessity starts at a different location in your BIOS load.CTRL-ALT-DELETE is a warm boot. It starts in a different location in your BIOS load. That is why the virus checkers want you to do a Power-off or cold boot to ensure you haven't left any virus in memory.If you try using the CTRL-ALT-DELETE in mid BIOS, it also seems to mess up the sequence. It may be that BIOS hasn't set up all the proper addresses during the time you did the CTRL-ALT-DELETE. Sometimes, BIOS will tell you that the computer was interrupted during BIOS load and you need to turn the power off to reset or start from a cold boot.

Thanks, your help is much appreciated.I'm treating this like a random event for now. My worst fear at the time was that I had a bad HD, or even a flakey HD that may be a problem later. Thanks again,Bruce.