David A Abbe wrote:
>
> Hi gang,
>
> Here goes, I have a friend who called awhile ago.  Her battery failed and
> she lost all the info in her CMOS.  She has no backup copies of it
> anywhere.  She has no boot disks, startup disks, nuthin..  This is on an
> old 386 running win3.1.   She manually re-entered the numbers for her
> hard drive as follows:
> Type    Cyls    Head    Precomp Landz
> Sector  Size
> user    872       16                            342MB
>
> ok, write to bios and exit.
>
> continues to boot but still (now)  gets the FDD Controller and HDD
> Controller Failure warning and it goes no further.
...
Is she SURE that those are the correct paramaters for the hard drive?
If not, then that could be the source of the error message.  Has she
replaced the CMOS battery yet?  She should not have to reformat the
drive in order to get it to function properly.  Double check the
paramaters, and the seating of the cards and cables.  HTH

--
Larry Atlow                          Internet:[log in to unmask]
Microcomputer Analyst                Phonenet: (601) 264-9639