"Hard disk Failed Press H to retry or enter to boot from other device "

8 posts · originally from https://geek.digit.in/community/threads/hard-disk-failed-press-h-to-retry-or-enter-to-boot-from-other-device.53505/

I purchased my lenovo 3000c100 during may of 2006..

Yesterday when i switched it on...it went into a long bklank state.then came the message

"Hard disk Failed Press H to retry or enter to boot from other device "

Is it the end of the laptop.Later when i switched it on 15 mins later...It turned normal again..i could see the os choices and everthing went normal..When i restarted it again it was unable to boot showing the same messga again..

Can a hard disk not so old crash this early...??Is it the hardware or is it some virus denying access to the boot sector..coz when i was in my account i noticed empty copy of the folder i am in..On clicking that i go into explorer mode.??

Virus or Hardware's out????

IT must be under warranty if u bought in may 2006, get it checked.
It may be faulty IDE cable which at times is working & other times denying to boot.

So are you sure the hard disk's all right...

No I cant say say that all is fine with HDD but if its gone bad, then it would have shown you signs of faliure, the comp starts hanging, you would have to do hard boots.....................................in ur case seems some other issue......................u have the warranty get it to lenovo.

hey,have you installed any other OS ?make sure your hard disk is setup to first booting device.It may be possible that ur boot loader file has been crupt.Try fixing the boot loader file using bootloader(google it)

^^^Yes the hard disc has four partitions...Three of them contain winxp pro,home,mediacenter respectively...

Pro and home don't work..Currently i'm using media centre...

Also yesterday when i turned on the system everthing came up jus fine..i restarted and everything was fine...

i googled bootloader which one to download.???

uzair said:
Also yesterday when i turned on the system everthing came up jus fine..i restarted and everything was fine...

If everything is working fine now..than why you want to do some tweaking???

Could be a possibe hdd crash which resulted in bad/corrupted sectors .To be on the safe side , do an error check of your primary partition.