At 07:49 AM 05/15/2000 , Brad Loomis wrote:
>Good day,
>I received a call from my daughter about her 486-66. She said she started
>having "problems" running programs last week. Then yesterday upon booting
>she received the message on booting "FDD controller failure" and "HDD
>controller Failure" "Press F1 to resume". Natch, she can't boot. I assume
>that means that the controller card has taken a dump. Am I correct in this
>long distance diagnosis? Is this as simple as pulling the old controller
>card and plugging in a new one? Well, that and blowing out about ten pounds
>of cat hair. I found a SIIG Fast EIDE card
>http://www.siig.com/ide/eide_master_isa___io.html at the local Fry's and it
>looks like what I need. Am I on the right track? Of course this comes as
>grad school mid-terms are due.

The first thing that comes to mind with an older system is that the battery
on the motherboard is going bad.  This of course would lead to loosing
the CMOS settings and of course you would have the error you report.

I would check and see if the CMOS settings are still correct before I
invested in a new controller card.

     Bob Wright
The NOSPIN Group

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