Dell Crazyness with disappearing hard drives 1

[americanmcneil]

Just though I would share this with anyone who may find it useful. I recently did a windows XP OS repair and clean up for a friend of mine in Ohio. I am in NC so he just shipped me the box. Long story short, I fixed the box (a Dell Dimension 3000) and shipped it back to him.

I got a frantic call from him after he got the box back saying his computer didn't work anymore. All he got was an error stating "Diskette Drive 0 Seek Failure. Hit F1 to continue or F2 to Enter Setup" Now the funny thing is that his system does not have nor ever had a floppy drive. I had him go into BIOS and check boot sequence and it told him that there were no hard drives installed. (This box actually had two HD's as I installed the second one for him about two years ago before he moved to Ohio) So, the hard drives had disappeared and the system was searching for a component it never had. Have any of you ever heard of this? Anyway, after running the gambit of checking cables, power supply connections and what not, all seemed lost. I did a quick Google search on the error and found a few things to try and as it turn out it was the CMOS battery. It had started to die on the trip back to Ohio. I had him run to Radio Shack and pick up a new one and the box cranked right back up and all he had to do was reset the time and date.

The moral of this story? Never underestimate the power of the little CMOS battery.

Peace out Cub Scouts

Scott "Thrown to the Wolves" McNeil

http://www.epproach.net

 

[xit]

Scott, that is a good one to put into the remember file.

Strange things happen & we forget the simple solutions looking for complex fixes

thanks

xit