simon04

I've restarted in safe mode, but the A;\ does not appear there either.

I'm unable to see the contents in Windows, as there is no A:\ drive showing anywhere. If I insert a floppy (boot) dist at bootup, it will load from the floppy, proving the drive itself is working.

I did check the cable for the same reason, but found it was correct, as it puts up an error if it is reversed. As far as I can tell, the drive is enabled and found in bios. It seems to work at system start up, but not in Windows :-(

I have got C: and D: drives as they should be.... I'm not wanting to boot from the floppy at present, but have come to a rare occasion where I need to access an old floppy....

Any help would be much appreciated..... This is a PC running Windows XP Home. There is no A;\ floppy drive shown in windows explorer\my computer. The floppy is wired correctly and powered up..... I can get the PC to attempt to boot from the floppy OK, but in windows, I can't see the A:\ drive at all.... In "devices" in control panel, the floppy disc controller is shown, which I have tried uninstalling and let it redetect, with no results... Thanks in advance, Simon.

Yes, the HDD is set to boot first in BIOS. I've run all the driver setup programs from the CD supplied with the motherboard.

I've managed to rule out all the items in the "startup" tab of msconfig. The freezing still occurred on reboot after I had disabled all of these items.....

Thanks. Yes, the DVD drive is working fine.... I will have a go at the trial and error route in the mean time, and see what happens :-)

Sorry, I can't remember whether the problem happened slightly before or slightly after the DVD drive. It seems to have frozen more often lately, which is why I've been monitoring it more closely.

The problem wasn't evident after this work being done, however, the SATA DVD drive was added a while after, so I can't tell whether or not this was the cause.... Forgot to mention.... I've already tried uninstalling AVG and changed to a different mouse, PS2 this time, incase either of these were affecting the boot.

Im running a machine with Win XP home. I'm finding some of the time, it freezes after booting ...... the mouse will not move, and keyboard doesn't respond. The furthest I can get is seeing the desktop and taskbar icons loading..... Again, it does not do this everytime, but atleast daily. By hitting the reset button, this will sometimes get the PC to restart and boot properly. (It has recently had new motherboard,cpu,ram,DVD drive and clean install of Win XP). Any help much appreciated. Thanks in advance, Simon.

I now think I've pinpointed the boot (memory) issue and returned the RAM's to the vendor, who will be exchanging them for a single 2GB RAM.... The shutdown problem is still there, and the only further thought I has is that the PC is listed as a "MPS Multiprocessor PC in device manager".... However, given that the motherboard is ACPI compliant, I wondered if the device manager should actually display thi9s as "ACPI Multiprocessor PC" instead??

I am fairly familiar with BIOS, and have ensured the ACPI is enabled. The problem has just occurred after a new Motherboard bundle and clean install of Win XP Home.

Unfortunately, the registry patch didn't do the trick..... I did find this post: "It is Now Safe to Turn Off Your Computer" error message when you try to shut down your computer However, it seems not to relate to my system, despite being for XP

I've downloaded and extracted the file, but I couldn't find your last post regarding uninstalling the IDE drives..... Do you just mean uninstalling them with device manager??