Vista - Disk Boot Error

Hello ladies and gents. I am having an issue with my computer running vista ultimate x64. I have an ASUS M2N-SLI motherboard, 2 one-gig sticks of Patiot DDR2 800MHz RAM, a Pioneer DVD-RW optical drive, a nVidia GeForce 8600 video card, an AMD Athalon dual core processor, onboard sound/networking, and two hard drives: one being 160 gb, and the other being 1 tb. Okay, now onto the problem. I keep getting the disk boot error, "DISK BOOT FAILURE INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". This is after a plethora of previous problems. I was playing World of Warcraft two days prior, and the computer just froze out of the blue. This was not a common occurance, so I just rebooted the machine. It kept coming up with a "Windows failed to start due to a recent hardware or software change" etc etc. You press enter to get to the two options, either vista or the memory diagnostics. I tried vista and it would just go back to the original, then I hit the diagnostic and it didn't help. I turned the computer off and fiddled witht the connections to the hard drives. When I booted it up, I was estatic that it went into windows. But it would load up the toolbar and stop loading. After a few more attempts to get it up and running, it didn't change, except it sometimes loaded up my background and desktop icons as well. The repair utility said everthing was fine. I decided there was nothing I needed to save that badly, and reformatted the computer and reinstalled Vista. It would install, load up, and as soon as the comuter restarted at all, it would give a disk boot error. I've reinstalled vista on different hard drives multiple times, and it always gives a disk boot error. Anybody have a better idea than me?

I'm sorry. Never mind. In the BIOS, it was set to boot from the opposite hard drive. Fixed it.

Hello, I'm having a similar problem with an eMachine with Vista home premium. It happened after I installed some software from Verizon. I've since uninstalled it, but I'm still getting the disk failure error. Right now I'm doing a memory check, which I wasn't able to do from the recovery option; I had to run it before it began loading Vista. When I'm in the recovery tool, the startup repair doesn't run at all. It tells me I don't have a hard drive, or that it can't find it; it seems to think my C: drive is a removable drive. I've run chkdsk several times, and it says it's repairing files and indexes. I'm able to get into Vista using the boot disk, but today the PC rebooted itself, then I got the blue screen. Since then, I either have to use safe mode, or if I go in normally, I get the blue screen again. Does anyone have any ideas? I can't do a complete reinstall because I don't have backups of several important files. Thanks.

Someone on this site suggested using Spinrite to fix my hard drive problem. I eventully had to bite the bullet and spend the $89, but guess which machine I'm sending this message from? It was worth the price because it fixed my problem.