Alright, some progress anyway.  The error message may still be refering to
the hard disk.  Does the floppy light at least flicker immediately before
the error message "Disk boot failure..."?  If your floppy diskette ribbon
cable has two connectors, the boot diskette drive must be on the end, past
the little twist the cable has in its center.  The middle connector on a two
connector diskette cable is reserved for drive B, which will not boot a pc
with an industry standard bios.  So the light could come on during the POST
(power on self test), but never come on when it is time to load the
operating system.  I would do something else as well. I would go into cmos
and document the hard drive settings for the master on the primary ide and
all other drives.  Then set the master on the primary, and any other ide
devices, to 'uninstalled'.  Before you save and exit cmos, note if the drive
type selection list has an entry for 'auto', because this will make
reactivating the hard disks that much easier.  Regardless of what the cmos
has as table entries for cylinders and heads, etc. it will generally work if
you come back and set it to 'auto'.  Keep your notes as a fallback however.
Now save cmos and exit, and see if the message stays the same.

There is a simple way to refresh a hard disk if your not nervous about
moving things around inside the case.  Open two pc cases, placing them
within 18 inches of each other so the ribbon cable will reach.  On the good
pc, take (now might be a good time to remind us to unplug the power cord
from both pc's) the ribbon cable off of the secondary ide master device,
usually its the cdrom drive. It has to be a ribbon cable that connects
directly to the motherboard or ide expansion slot PCI adapter card.  If it
connects to another hard disk, it might be the channel for a slave, and that
won't do, it has to be a master to be simple.  If you have two ribbon cables
and two hard disks, take the cable from the disk that is not C. On the bad
pc take the ribbon cable off of the boot hard disk.  Connect good pc's cdrom
ribbon cable end to bad pc's hard disk, making sure the stripe on the ribbon
cable faces the hard disk's power connector (pin 1 must connect to the red
stripe).  Position the pc's so the cable is not stretched.  Put the power
cords back on, turn on the bad pc.  You should hear the hard disk spin up
(you only need one monitor by the way, there is no need to see the bad pc
display) and a beep or two.  I sometimes unplug the keyboard just to force a
post error before I apply power.  Now turn on the good pc.  Hit 'del' to
enter cmos. Go to basic setup, and write down what the secondary master ide
is setup as.  Set the secondary master channel to auto.  save and exit cmos.
The bad pc hard disk c will now be the good pc hard disk d, without fail,
because it is an active partition and the second active partition in a pc is
always d.  Now, you can't repartition yet, but you can format and copy the
operating system to the drive d.  After that copy config.sys and
autoexec.bat from a bootable diskette with cdrom drivers into d:\ and edit
them if necessary so it can find the files himem.sys, the cdrom driver, and
mscdex.exe. Turn everything off.  Remember to turn off both pc's.  Reconnect
the ribbon cables the way they were originally.  Boot the good pc, press del
to enter cmos and put back the original settings for the secondary master
ide channel.  Get a monitor for the bad pc, and boot it up.  It should come
to a dos c:\ prompt after loading the cdrom support.  Now you can install
windows.  I have assumed a few things, like you can edit a config.sys and
you can navigate cmos, but really, it doesn't take that long to have the bad
pc back up.  IF the rest of the pc seems okay, then you can go back to
troubleshooting the floppy.
Tom Turak


-----Original Message-----
From: Catherine Williamson [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2001 3:48 AM

I've changed the floppy cable and checked the pins and my connections.
Also put in a different, tho not new floppy. In CMOS I've got Floppy
seek enabled, floppy swap disabled, boot sequence A,C and Onboard FDD
enabled.

Tom, I was very tempted to load Bios default and load Setup
default but dared not. Also checked the twist in the cable like you said.

Carroll, I'm taking your advice not to swap harddrives (sounds scary anyway)

Anyway when I start the computer, I can hear and see the floppy spinning.
The light came on for 3-4 seconds, then goes out (Previously it was on
all the time). There is no longer the message "Floppy disk(s) fail (40
)".
When I try to boot with a floppy I get the message "Disk boot failure,
insert system disk and press Enter". I know the floppy disk is good coz
I can boot up another computer. I don't know what else to do.
Cathy

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