won't boot, even in safe mode

[butler]

Hi All, I'm looking at a comp for a friend and I'm stuck !

It's a Dell Dimension 3100C, P4 3gb processor, 512 mb RAM 80 gb HDD Win XP.

 

I switch on and get the opening screen, but before the progress bar gets all the way across it gives two beeps and goes onto an error screen telling me floppy diskette seek failure, it doesn't have a floppy drive, apparently it's built in. It won't boot into safe mode, but will go into bios.

If anyone has any ideas or advice I will be most grateful, thanks, Ralph.

[Jelly Bean]

Hello there.

 

Not sure if this will help but enter BIOS and set first boot to hard drive and the second to CD/DVD rom.

 

Save and exit.

 

Now has the floppy disk error gone?

[butler]

Hi Jelly Bean, tried that, unfortunately no joy, but thanks anyway.

[Jelly Bean]

Have you tried disable the floppy drive in BIOS?

 

Or load defaults in BIOS?

[Tootech]

it doesn't have a floppy drive

 

apparently it's built in

 

Top quote means there is no floppy drive, bottom quote suggests there is - help!!!!!

 

Does it have a floppy drive??

 

floppy diskette seek failure

 

On most systems you can press something like F1 to continue and ignore the error.

 

Also, there can be an option for Floppy Seek in the BIOS even when there is no drive attached - have a look around the settings.

 

In most BIOS programs there is an option to tell it to carry on booting even if there are errors - its called "Halt on" and there are options such as "All Errors", "Keyboard Only", "No Errors" etc - its worth switching to "No Errors".

 

What is the Dell Service Tag? Its easy to check your BIOS setup with that info :)

[butler]

Right, I have an update !

I took it to a guy with testing equipment and it turns out the hard drive has had it, if it was an IDE I wouldn't mind, got some of those, but it's a SATA so it will have to wait.

Thanks for your help guys, Ralph

[RandyL]

Thanks for letting us know butler.

 

If I read this thread correctly that might explain it.

 

If the BIOS was set to to read HD>Floppy>CD in that order then if it couldn't read the hard drive, which would explain the no safe mode option, then it would move on to the next drive.

 

Since there was no floppy drive on the computer it would cause an error. Had that been disabled in the BIOS or if there was a bootable CD in the CD drive it might have moved on to the CD drive.

 

Please let us know how it goes once you get a new sata drive and reinstall Windows to it.