FDC Failure

[techlink]

I have a dell dimension L933r that won't boot up it just gives me an error that says FDC Failure Press <Del> to Resume.
When I press <Del> it says Invalid Boot Diskette Insert BOOT diskette in A: I do this and get the same Invalid Boot Disk error. What's up with this? There have been no hardware or software changes. Would it mean the drive is bad?

 

[bcastner]

Go figure.

But I learned a lot from this thread, and wanted to say thank you to all that participated.

Best regards,
Bill Castner

 

[techlink]

As an added note, in the process of setting up the computer I found that the network card was bad. I am wondering if the power outage that the customer experienced attributed to the FDC error, quite ofter a surge will take out the network card maybe it caused other problems as well.

 

[edfair]

POST, which is where your problem occurred, reads and writes to various locations. If the NIC responded to a FDC read request you would get invalid stuff back.

There are several partition table virii that can hijack the floppy controller. You may have had one of those.

Without reinstalling the virus, or reinstalling the NIC, you will proceed thru life not knowing which it is.

In retrospect, you might have cut down the diagnostic time by attempting to boot with the floppy only. Disconnecting the hard drives would have eliminated the virus, had there been one. But unless you've been hit with one fairly recently you tend to forget that it can happen. I think bootb was the last one that bit me that way. That was probably 8 to 10 years ago.

In any case, glad you are up and running.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[techlink]

I did try reinstalling the NIC the computer recognizes it but it will not work. A new one works fine. Had it been a boot virus could the hard drive been saved by scanning from another computer or would it need to be formated?

 

[edfair]

Should have been savable from a scan from wherever. But there is the possibility that it was some sort of corruption that wasn't a virus but acted like one.
Doing a fdisk /mbr might have rewritten the boot record if the problem was there, but I doubt that it was in there since a problem there would affect POST later, after the floppy would have attempted a read.


Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.