disk io error

I have a problem which, so far, has defied solution. To start with, it is a charity job, which I should know better. It's hard to deny help to a disabled family member on a meger pension. The system has an Amptron K7-825DLU (PC Chips) board (ugh) with an AMD Duron 1.2 Gig proc and 256 Meg of ram. It had been working ok until recently. It began throwing the following error code on bootup, even before Windows 2000 loaded. The error is disk io error 00008001. I took the computer and looked into it. it had a Maxtor 8 gig and a segate 3 gig hard drive. I supposed that one of these tired relics was dying, and ordered a new WD800BB drive and a shielded ATA cable from New Egg. I installed the new drive and got the same code while attempting to format the new drive with windows 2000 Pro. The system functions after the code is thrown, but it causes me concern that this won't improve with age. I serched the Microsoft Knowledge base with no success. It has, in adition to the hard drive a generic 3.5" floppy, a Liteon 52k cD burner, and an Iomega 100M zip drive of undeterminate age. I am about to eliminate the zip and cd drives and see if that solves the problem. Any assistance would be appreciated.
Jim

try without the zip drive , that might be the item causing the problems also stick to a single drive , don,t put any of the old ones in as a D: drive ,

good luck, if the fault persists , come back for more help.

You got it the first time! The Zip Drive is flakey. My Mother-in-law own the computer. I've tried to convince her that A cd burner is much better than a Zip drive for backups. She is afraid of the the CD burner, even though I set up Nero Packet writing on it. She panics when she forgets to mount or unmount the disk and things "don't work". The zip drive has the advantage of working about like a floppy drive, with which she is familiar. By the way, are the zip drives still available? I haven't seen one in some time.
By the way, I'll install the old hard drives just long enough to retrieve her data, and then they are headed for the dustbin.
Jim

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Originally Posted by jaimicook

You got it the first time! The Zip Drive is flakey. My Mother-in-law own the computer. I've tried to convince her that A cd burner is much better than a Zip drive for backups. She is afraid of the the CD burner, even though I set up Nero Packet writing on it. She panics when she forgets to mount or unmount the disk and things "don't work". The zip drive has the advantage of working about like a floppy drive, with which she is familiar. By the way, are the zip drives still available? I haven't seen one in some time.
By the way, I'll install the old hard drives just long enough to retrieve her data, and then they are headed for the dustbin.
Jim

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ok glad i could help you ,or at least suggest summot that you already knew .

don,t know if you can still get zip drives ,

if they feel that they have to do a phisical backup , then put the larger (best) old drive in an external case , and let them do it that way. although the cost of cd,s is so low now , it,s not worth making the effort,

glad to help.