Drive A not accessible

[Amateur]

Dear friends,<br>
My Drive A, when it is selected, hangs a while then blurts out&quot; Drive A not accessible, Retry, Cancel&quot;. It is in the CMOS setup. Its light blinks at POST. No hardware conflict. The PC stops loading when a floppy is in it since I am asked to remove the floppy and hit a key to continue.<br>
It is a Desktop PC Intel P55C 233 Mhz MMX, 4 MB Diamond Video Card, 64 MB RAM, Win 98, 240 MB left on Drive C.<br>
Please help me out. Thanks

 

[gsd]

Can you boot with a boot disk? If you can, at c prompt type dir and see if you get a listing of files on the disk. If this works it should not be your floppy drive. If this does not work-<br>
Have you tried reading more than one disk?<br>
You said you see it in cmos but when the system boots up, do you see it listed and as the correct floppy drive?<br>
Data cable loose or backwards? <br>
Do you have another floppy to try in this machine?<br>
<br>
When did this problem start - have you had the case off recently, moved the pc,etc.<br>
Has the floppy ever worked in win98, when you said no hardware conflict did you check in device manager? Are you trying to read the disk in a certain program? Have you tried it in explorer? I hope I have not been to simple, not sure what you do know or not know?<br>
Let us know

 

[Amateur]

Hi thanks for being meticulous. I am trying to be as meticulous as I can in answering your questions and provide you more with in-depth information.<br>
1. Yes I can boot with a boot disk.<br>
2. @ C prompt it reads the dir of the floppy, which is correct. It cannot read from windows.<br>
3. New cable and new drive, just replaced to make sure. Hook up is OK. Red to pin 1 on both FDC and FD.<br>
4. It had worked before in win98<br>
5. CMOS lists the drive as A 1.44 M 3.5 in- B: none<br>
6. Drive light blinks then off when system boots up.The system stops the loading if a floppy is in the drive.<br>
7. Power Management S/U: FD enabled.<br>
8. My PC/Properties/Device Manager/<br>
. Disk Drive and FDD Controller are listed<br>
9. Start/.../Syst Tools/Syst Info/<br>
/Hardware Resources:<br>
. DMA 2 Standard FDC<br>
. IRQ 6 FDC<br>
/Components/Storage: fdc- Alloc Resource- Logical Configuartion O- IRQ 6 Mask : x0000- DMA 2 Mask: x0000-<br>
Driver: HSFLOP.pdr 4/23/99- size 25741.<br>
10. My Comp/Prop/Performance/ <br>
/File System: All drives are using MS-DOS Compatibility Mode<br>
/Virtual Memory: MS-DOS Compatibility Mode<br>
and in a window, it says &quot;Compatibility-mode paging reduces system performance. TRIDMA in Config.Sys requires MS-DOS compatibility mode&quot;???<br>
<br>
Also at C:\Windows&gt; when I typed Win to return to Windows, the message was something like this: &quot;Registry does not exist-System.ini not found. Needs to reload Windows setup.&quot; Then the system turned itself off. ????<br>
<br>
I would appreciate your figuring it out to get me out of this mess and give me a valuable tech lesson(it may not be a mess to you, but to me it is a huge one). Thanks Webcrazy and anyone else who wants to chip in their ideas.<br>
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8. Integrated Peripherals: Onboard FDD Controller Enabled

 

[Alt255]

Have you run a virus scanner lately? I could be way off base but I've seen similar problems on a system infected with an Empire virus variant.<br>
<br>
Try REMming the TRIDMA line in the CONFIG.SYS.<br>
<br>
Can you use &quot;safe mode&quot;? That's a good place to start.

 

[royalnut]

Amateur you had said ....<br>
&gt;The PC stops loading when a floppy is in it since I am<br>
&gt;asked to remove the floppy and hit a key to continue.<br>
this is something which will happen with all the systems. As you know the system would either read from the hard disk or with a boot disk, so if you put any other disk it will display this message. <br>
<br>
As for the disk not working in windows, well from your second posting it appears that you have pretty bad setup of windows. Try and reinstall it. If not sure get someone who knows about it. Do take backup of your imp files before taking this option

 

[Amateur]

Thanks Royalnut,<br>
The drive is working fine after I re-installed windows.<br>
Amateur