Twice this week I’ve been thrown this message in my face. First it was a friend of mine who couldn’t get his computer starting, the last time it was me. After the “Boot Disc Failure” message, BIOS tries to help out by suggesting you insert the system disc. At first I thought it meant the install CD for my OS, later we discovered this wasn’t the case…

You might think your drive is gone to heaven, but on the other hand it might be something as simple as the cables not being properly attached. Over the phone I instructed my friend to open up the desktop (more like the “black box” in this case) and look for a black “thingy” (that’s HD for the more experienced one), then disconnect and reconnect the wide gray cables. And voila, everything went back to normal. I had to do exactly the same this morning and thank God and knock on wood and all that, it worked. I suppose you would have to invest in a new HD and serious amount of time otherwise to get the systems up and running as before. I’m now in the middle of creating a more decent backup plan…

I’ll post more stuff on other hardware related issues in the future, as most individual parts have their own specific symptoms. Instead of spending additional euros on a service person doing what you could have done, you might spend those euros on something else (like more hardware…).