I recently bought a second hand untested HP Omnibook 4000CT laptop. It has a 486 100Mhz processor, 16MB RAM and a 500MB hard disk. My problem is as follows: When I boot up the computer, it says "Disk I/O error, Please replace and try again". I can boot from a DOS 3.3 floppy, but when I do, I cannot access the hard drive. When I type "c:" it says "Invalid drive specification". I thought the hard drive may be faulty, but I tried it in a different laptop and it worked fine. I also tried the working hard drive from the other laptop in the Omnibook and got the same "Disk I/O error". The BIOS picks up the hard dirve on auto detect, I have also tried to manually enter the cylinders, heads and sectors, but I get the same error. I booted from the floppy and ran various diagnostic programs from another floppy which all accessed and scanned the hard drive. The hard drive indicator flashed and I heared it working too. However it says that there are no problems. I am not using the correct power supply for this laptop since I bought it without one. It requires 21.v @ 1.35a but I am using a different PSU which outputs 20v @ 1.5a. Could this have something to do with it? Or is it a hard disk controller or motherboard problem. If so, how can I solve it??? Please help! Many thanks.

The hard drive does not have a valid partiton table - oh bloddy hell - sorry. I hope there is nothing really valueable on it. if there is you will need to take it to a hardware technician who will charge you lots and lots of money to recover the data, and it is very hard, so its not money for old rope. if you can stand the loss, and you just want the computer to work, boot from the floppy dis, and type fdisk at the command prompt Select 1 create primary dos partition, select y if it talks about large hard drives - i think it won't. Select y, you want to use all of the free space for this partiion and mark the partition active. exit from fdisk, reboot with the floppy disk! at the command prompt, type format c#/s # = colon, its bust on this computer.

If the FDISK doesn't work, it's time to look into some new IDE connectors in that box, brother. And why the hell are you running DOS 3.3 on that thing? Get 6 in there, baseline. UTILIZE that memory, man!

I already tried the FDISK, but there already exists a non-dos partition. It was created using PHDISK. Any other ideas?

Get a zero-fill utility or delpart from www.bootdisk.com. Either will remove partitions.

LOL! You need the setup disk for that notebook model from Hewlett-Packard support, part of the CMOS is loaded to your hard drive.

I'm trying to install Win98 and i keep getting Disk I/O error: Status 00001000. What the hell does that mean? Need Help - greatly appreciated Suneal