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August 18th, 2001, 06:31 PM
#1
 I/O ERROR
I just stepped into a business behind a former tech that was canned. On the boss' PC I get an "I/O ERROR REPLACE DISK AND PRESS ANY KEY", yeah I'm familiar with this message, but there is no disk in place! It's froze won't boot, and I've tried every little command I can think of and all I get is an error message asking if I will abort,retry, or fail. Any ideas? It's an older Compaq Presario that the guy would really rather scrap, but I don't want to tell him he needs a new hard drive or PC when he doesn't.
Athlon 1900XP AGOGA,Volcano7 cooling,MSI KT3 Ultra2, 40G Maxtor ATA 133, 512MB PC3000 Mushkin, GF4 TI4400, Creative SB 5.1, TDK VeloCD, Antec case w/465W PS, Win XP
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August 19th, 2001, 10:03 AM
#2
Registered User
Sounds like it could be a floppy drive error to me, bad drive or bad cable possibly, also check power and ribbon cable connections at drive and board. Will it boot to dos with a dos boot disk? Can you access C: ? Does the BIOS recognise the hard drive? (Hit F10 to access BIOS on Compaqs when flashing square appears in upper right hand corner of screen.) Guess its possible that the previous tech messed the system up before 'leaving'.... 
orange
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning -+- Rich Cook
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August 19th, 2001, 10:31 AM
#3
Sounds like there is no active partition or boot disk. Check the BIOS settings to make sure the hard disk[s] are being detected.
It make also be the "Boot" List within the BIOS is different. Check to see if the pc is trying to boot from the network or a different drive.
Good day to be alive, sir
Good day to be alive he says, yeah
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August 19th, 2001, 04:55 PM
#4
I dropped in a Win98 bootdisk just to see what it would do. Ran FDISK, partitions look fine, strange its a 3G hard drive but is broken into two smaller partitions. I only had a short time to look at, so I haven't fiddled with the Bios just yet. Thanks for the tips so far!! Oh yeah, running fdisk from the boot disk would pretty much rule out a floppy problem wouldn't it??
Athlon 1900XP AGOGA,Volcano7 cooling,MSI KT3 Ultra2, 40G Maxtor ATA 133, 512MB PC3000 Mushkin, GF4 TI4400, Creative SB 5.1, TDK VeloCD, Antec case w/465W PS, Win XP
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August 23rd, 2001, 05:18 PM
#5
yes your FD is working, looks like a HDD error. get back into Fdisk,and display the current configuration. you may have 2 primary partitions, and the system forgot wich one to boot to. in the display one of the partitions should have an "A" beside it, meaning that it is active and is the one that the Master boot record(MBR) will try to boot. (determine witch partiton has the OS on it before changing the active partition, or guess and test, set one active try it if it works fine if no, set the other one.) if changing cactive partions dont work then try rebuildign the MBR, this will not affect your data unless the system is totaly fryed. (run "fdisk /mbr" to do this). but before monkeying with te partitons, please check your cables, actualy disconnect then reconeect the ribbons! power should be fine, and check your BIOS, it may be trying to boot the CD-Rom, or some other device.
Windows (N): A 32 Bit patch to a 16 bit graphical interface based on a 8 bit operating system originaly encoded for a 4 bit processor writen by a 2 bit company that cant stand 1 bit of competition.
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