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I am building a new(old) system. I keep getting the message that I have a boot disk failure. I have tried 3 different disks from 3 different sources and none of them work. I know the floppy is first in the boot up sequence and that it is recognized in the bios. anybody have an idea what to do next? The HD isn't formatted yet, but I can't even get a dos prompt to do anything with.
Did you check your power and data cables are attached tight?Try hooking in a different A drive and see if it works; your floppy drive may have failed.
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Does the light come on on the floppy drive as it trys to read the floppy, is the light on all the time when you boot the computer? If the light is on all the time then you have your ribbon crossed on your floppy drive and if it ever gets crossed and trys to read the floppy it destroys the data on the floppy. lst make sure that when you boot the computer that the floppy light comes on just for a second while booting then goes off. Once you know you have the floppy drive correctly installed. Go make you another fresh startup disk and put it in and try again.
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I should have stated boot the computer without a floppy in the drive and see if the light stays on all the time on the drive. If the light stays on and no floppy in the drive then your ribbon is crossed on your floppy drive. Reverse the ribbon and try again. A correctly working floppy drive is as follows, when you boot the computer the light should come on for a second then go off. If it stays on it is not right.
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There is the possibility of plugging the A: drive cable in backwards. Verify that the red stripe on the flat cable is nearest to the power cable on the drive. The red stripe indicates pin one. Pin one is located nearest to the power jack on the back of the drive.
Verify the A: drive is plugged into the end of the floppy cable. (Assuming there are 2 connectors on the chain.) The end of the cable is the bootable drive. You may see a twist in the cable just after the first connector.
Here's a link to help you verify correct placement of the drive and cable orientation.
http://www.doublehammer.com/hardwarehelp/floppy.htm
Hope that helps. If I have pointed out the obvious and have been of no help, please forgive me. :)
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The light stays on the floppy drive either way the ribbon is attached. I remade a boot disk and switched the ribbon and still get the same error.
I tried changing the boot sequence to CD ROM first and boot from the OS CD, but got the same error that way too..
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If the light stays on on the floppy drive when you boot the computer and there is no floppy in the drive then the drive is bad or the ribbon is crossed!
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Also the windows me cd is not bootable. xp is bootable and you can put your xp cd in and change first boot device to cd drive and the xp cd will boot but not the me cd.
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You need to go in to set up and get the bios to AUTOMATICALLY configure the HD.
This worked for me.
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You might have a bad power supply also. That sometimes causes booting to stop at the floppy drive and it begins to affect other things as it gets worse like the cd rom and the hard drives. If you have the cable attached right at both ends, check the supply. A bad floppy drive would usually give you an error reading drive A message instead of just stopping.
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Thanks for the responses everybody. I figured since floppy's are so cheap, we're going to go buy a different one today and give it a shot.
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