HD/Floppy incompatibilty? Sat it ain't so. [cross-post]

majbach

Junior Member
Apr 13, 2003
7
0
0
Hi all. I don?t even know where to begin to do a search for this problem ? I don?t even know what component is causing it.
Went to fix a friend's PC today and encountered a problem unlike any I have seen before. I?ll do as best I can to keep this short. Basically, they just bought this used PC 24 hours ago and they?re pretty green with computers. It had an Asus P4B (I think that?s it ? I know it was only three figures) and a P4 1500 with windows 2000. After getting it home, they powered it up okay and set up their Internet account. They also used a floppy disk for something too. The next time they powered up, the floppy was still there and it gave them an error. So, remove floppy and reboot. Done. Still gave an error: ??I/O error code 40? or something similar. That?s when I came in. First I tried booting from a bootable floppy ? same error. Cracked open the case and disconnected the floppy. Still get an error but it is different ?Disk Boot failure? or something like that. Change the order of the start up in the bios to access C: drive first. Same error message.
Hooked up a different HD and still same message. Sat and looked confused.
I jostled and checked all the ribbon cables, hooked up original HD and rebooted; voila! up comes windows 2000. Great. So, I reboot into DOS with a bootable floppy (my original purpose there was to wipe the previous user?s HD clean and reinstall Windows). All seems fine until I type fdisk and get an error ?no fixed disks present? WTF?
Over the next two hours of trial and error, I observed the following:
With some tinkering around, I could get the PC to boot into windows from the HD (although I didn?t check to see if I could access the floppy from within windows). I could also boot into DOS from a floppy, although I had to change the bios start sequence to do these things. I also learned there was nothing wrong with the other floppy drive either. The problem came when I booted from a floppy disc, suddenly the HD wasn?t recognized ? even in the POST. The only way I could manage to get the PC to find the HD again was to disconnect the floppy and change the BIOS to boot from the HD first AND power up so that I got a disc error message and then power down again. I then HAD TO physically remove the ribbon cable from the HD and reattach and then power up again before it saw the HD. I tried changing all ribbon cables, but this was certainly not the problem as the errors were too consistent. All settings pertaining to the IDE cables were set to auto in the BIOS as well.
So, it seems that the HD and windows would work fine UNTIL I tried booting from a floppy. After that I had to remove the floppy and cables before I could get HD control back. I also concluded that perhaps the seller wasn?t aware of this as if all one ever did was boot into windows, the problem would go unnoticed. Is this a motherboard problem?
Thanks to all who took the time to read.
MajBach
 

KoolAidKid

Golden Member
Apr 29, 2002
1,932
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I don't see how it could be anything but a motherboard problem. This is the only component in which the floppy and hard drive could possibly interact. Can you RMA the mobo?