Problems with the windows machine

might need to sign up for a different forum but lets see what happens here:

im havin a problem with my windows machine (the dell i am going to be selling)

i get a few errors upon startup:
"Diskette drive 1 seek failure"

a few moments later:
"Primary hard disk drive 1 not found"

a few moments later:
"Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility"

if i hit f1 the computer just boots up...f2 brings me to all the bios settings or whatever they are called "system setup" i think

once booted up it recognizes my a:/ drive as a 5 1/4" floppy drive

and it does not recognize that i have 2 cdroms


does not boot from cdrom or floppy or anything

specs:
Dell dimension 8100
P4 1.5 ghz
256 ram
WinME

thanks
chris

has just recently happened?

try unplugging your floppy drive as that seams to be causing the problems and the see what messages you get

this shouldnt be that much of a surprise to anybody....

but i have not touched this pc for 3 years....they day i got my powerbook

i did not get this error before then

unplugging it i get a :
"diskette drive 0 seek failure
diskete drive 1 seek failure
diskette drive 0 seek failure
diskette drive 1 seek failure"

primary hard disk drive 1 not found
strike f1 to continue f2 to setup"

f1 boots windows fine

before you posted and my last post it let me reinstall windows on a hd i had laying around and everything was working fine in regards to my cdroms showing up

but i still get:
"Diskette drive 1 seek failure"

a few moments later:
"Primary hard disk drive 1 not found"

a few moments later:
"Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility"


-chris

although I have cannot offer assistance in this issue, since all of windows knowledge "dripped" out of my brain since I got a mac, and now I expect things to happene logically, I would like to point out..that this...is why we have macs

yes..this post was a waste of storage on mac-forums...but I have time to kill until American Idol is on

You need to run the setup utility (the bios) and change the floppy dirve to the standard 3.5 inch (as it is set to 5 inch it is telling you it cannot find it, and it won't since you have a standard one installed)

Then you need to find (in the BIOS settings) the hard drive and do a recognition search to set the parameters for the drive again.

Then you need to save and restart machine. If you get the same error messages, go back into BIOS and find the key for "set BIOS defaults" which is usually F5. (F7 is usually advanced BIOS features).

Then save and restart again, if the same issue occurs, it is very likely your BIOS battery needs replacing, cost all of a couple of quid and very easy to do. This can easily be determined if the date is also incorrect in the BIOS (another sign of a failing battery).

If your BIOS battery is not failing, then it could be the IDE channels on the motherboard since it is not recognising the floppy or the hard disk correctly.

Yeah, if removing the floppy doesn't help and the BIOS settings that you choose to be standard doesn't help, it may be possible to flash the BIOS - depending on the age and capability of the ROM. It can be a sketchy process though.

Assuming you don't care about the info on the HDD, perhaps try formatting the master boot record, "fdisk /mbr" from the command line. I've only had to use this trying to get rid of boot issues after Linux dual boots, usually after I remove disk druid.

Assuming you don't care about the info on the HDD, perhaps try formatting the master boot record, "fdisk /mbr" from the command line. I've only had to use this trying to get rid of boot issues after Linux dual boots, usually after I remove disk druid.

Click to expand...

Formatting the drive or fixing the MBR won't achieve anything at this stage, since it is a BIOS related issue. The BIOS needs to recognise all drives correctly first before a format can be achieved since Windows takes its information from the BIOS.

you got the master/slave jumpers setup correctly on your cdroms/hard drives?