Hi

I am running Window 95 on one of my computers. About a month a ago I think i got a virus well i think it was one. A lot of symbols started to appear on the desktop. Well any way the computer stopped responding and wouldn't reboot to windows so i carried the hard drive down to one of the local shops and the ran fdisk and the they said come home and install the cd-rom drivers and then install window. Well when i put the bootable disk to install the drivers the floppy drive doesn't read the disk. IT says General Error Reading Drive A Abort, Retry, Fail. I have tried a lot of different disk and they were all formatted first. I also checked the Cmos and the Bios for floppy problems but still won't work. I hope you can give me some advise for my problem.

The ribbon wire for the floppy disk is on backwards. Make sure the side with the red stripe matches (pin 1) on both the drive and the motherboard floppy port.

I have all the cables on right he red strip is on the side of the power cord.

Perhaps the floppy drive is bad. Also the ribbon cable may be bad. First thing to do is go into BIOS and make sure that it's identified as a 1.44 megabyte floppy and not a 1.2 or something else.

Also check the light on the floppy drive. Does it stay on continiously after boot up or does it flash?

-Michael

Floppy drives usually have (pin 1) opposite of the power input. Don't ask why. it just is.

Yes floppy ribbon cables tend to have the red stripe away from the power connector. The easiest way to tell is to observe the indicator light on the drive. If the light illuminates on power up and stays lit the entire time (I.E. no flashing, just a solid light) then most likely the ribbon cable is on backwards. Also note that sometimes having a disk in the drive while the ribbon cable is on backwards will effectively make the disk unreadable until it's reformatted. Another thing to note is that drive A must be connected to the connector on the ribbon cable that is after the twist. I.E. The cable should have a connector that connects to the motherboard, then two connectors at the the end that attach to the drives, with the farthest connector preceded by a twist in the cable. You must use this farthest connector to denote that the floppy is drive A.
Hope this info helps,
Michael

(: as well, from time-to-time, drives don't read the data on a floppy correctly if they have been used on an alternate drive where data has been written to them, even though they work fine on their own. Floppies have had this inherent problem for a long time.

Try asking a friend to make you a new boot disk from your cd.

-Worm

Your problem might be corrupt files. They would produce the strange symbols you saw as the problem started. You didn't experience a power failure when this started?
Did you have to reset Drive A: to 1.44 Mb in the BIOS. I think something not necessarily a virus has caused files on your hard drive to become corrupt. (Anything can cause the corrupt files. I once had Doublespace set on
C:D:E:F:G: and I ruined the files on drive D: by hooking up a slave hard drive for one boot. But it is usually a power failure or booting with the wrong data for hard drives in the bios that causes the problem)

well have tried all of the that and the the weird thing is that man that formated the drive said come home and type in Format C: /s to install the system files and that still won;t the only thing in the hard drive is com Command. I don't know what is wron with the computer. i have also tried other floppy and the won't work either.