My brother's PC (Dell C521) is no longer booting into Windows. I am able to get into the BIOS to make adjustments to the settings. However, just after the PC is turned on and after the option to enter the BIOS, the PC will stop booting. Yesterday, I would get "Diskette Drive 0 Seek Failure" message on every boot. There is no floppy drive on this PC. Today, I don't get the message anymore, but the PC still refuses to boot (made some adjustments to the BIOS). I tried using Dell's recovery disk, but it does not work. The CD will spin initially, then nothing. I tried a personal Windows XP disk with the same result. However, the Dell diagnostic disk works. I ran a quick (20 minute) diagnostic and everything seems fine. I disabled the floppy drive and removed the floppy drive in the boot sequence. I've removed all USB devices except for the keyboard and mouse. The only other thing connected is the monitor. The boot sequence has been modified from CD/HDD to HDD/CD and back with no benefit - multiple times. There is only one hard disk drive and one DVD writer. No other storage device is present. I removed one of the two memory modules to see if it was a memory problem. No go. I didn't remove the other one because it's in a tough spot to put back in. I'm at my wits end. At this point, I don't know if it's a hardware problem or a problem with a BIOS setting. Can someone help? I read a posting by someone named "CrazyOne" from 2006. While his solution solved the original poster's problem (which was similar to mine), it didn't resolve my issue when I tried it. However, the original poster was able to get into Windows after pressing the Continue (F2) key even before the fix. When I push the F2 key, the system just hangs. Please help. Thank you.

Doesn't sound like you considered the option that the hard drive died. Put the floppy back in and set bios to floppy/cd/hdd. Boot a floppy with fdisk. If when you start fdisk is says no drives found you know why you aren't booting. Imagine the power if you knew how to internet search

Is the HDD seen in the BIOS? Life's more painless for the brainless.

The HDD is seen in BIOS. The reason why I don't think the HDD is dead is because the diagnostic came back positive. Also, the DVD writer doesn't boot the Dell restoration disk nor my personal XP disk. But it does "boot" the Dell diagnostic disk.

I forgot to add that this system does not have a floppy disk. It didn't come with one.

I think the next step would be to get a bootable CD (either of the Live Linux or BartPE variety), and see what's on the HDD, if anything.

I discovered that Dell had a restoration partition on the hard drive. All I had to do was press a combination of keys at startup and the restore to factory setting menu appeared. It's up and running now. The only downside is that any files saved on the HDD were lost. I still don't know why the DVD drive wouldn't boot the bootable CDs. I'm guessing the HDD had some kind of a boot sector problem.