Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
8 Posts
0
27914
Floppy Disk Seek Failure on Dimension 3100
We have several Dimension 3100's at our church. Two of them have started giving a message as follows:
Floppy Disk Seek Failure, Press F1 to continue, F2 to run Setup
There is no Floppy Disk on any of our machines. I have pressed F2 and designated the floppy as not present. On one machine the message discontinued for a while then reappeared. It is still designated as not present on that machine.
The other machine will sometimes boot when you press F1, sometimes will not.
Any ideas??
jackshack
6.4K Posts
0
August 6th, 2008 20:00
I would try replacing the NVRAM back-up cell. With low voltage from that cell I've seen some interesting things. One of my older Dell computers would forget that it had a diskette drive under that circumstance.
electromagnetic
556 Posts
0
August 7th, 2008 23:00
Drives
Diskette Drive Identifies and defines the floppy drive attached to the FLOPPY connector
on the system board as Off, USB, Internal, or Read Only.
Go into system bios F2 and then go down to drives and for floppy connector select off save and exit.
Ozzie42
1 Message
0
July 14th, 2013 22:00
Hi, I have this same problem, but there isn't any "floppy disks" on my Dimension3100 PC. Soooo, what can I do,Please?
I sometimes can open Windows [XP] and start emailing etc then it all shuts down, or squiggly coloured screen. Firstly tho when I turn on PC green numbers 3&4 and buzzing noise 6 times so I turn it off. But the numbers 23&4 sometimes flash on pc also. The problem cannot be fixed from the Dell Book. There more to this problem but I would take up too much room here.
Hopefully someone has the answer for me. Thanks
jackshack
6.4K Posts
0
July 14th, 2013 22:00
As I wrote in my post of four years ago, failure of the CR 2032 CMOS back-up cell can lead to this problem. The 3.5 inch diskette drive is a legacy device, even for a computer as old as the Dimension 3100. If the CMOS settings are erased as a result of low back-up cell voltage, the computer will normally boot to the default settings. Default for this device is "On", or sometimes the wording is "Enabled". The diskette drive is not a plug and play device; Windows will believe the setting means that the drive is present, and send a seek command to move the read/write heads. When no response is received, an error results. Once you replace the CR 2032, go to System Setup (F2 during the self test after starting the computer), locate the setting for the diskette drive, described as drive A: in some computers, and turn it off.
The other problems you are reporting may indicate you have more trouble than simply a failed CMOS back-up cell, but you should replace the cell first to see how many of the symptoms disappear, or if any of them disappear.