diskette drive 0 seek failure

Question

I have dimension 3000 desktop and last night I completely powered down the system(with no errors) but when I went to power it back it back on about an hour later, instead of seeing the traditional loading procedure, I saw the dell logo come up and following it was a message saying “diskette drive 0 seek failure”. This message keeps coming up every time I try to power up my computer and I can not go into the bios menu of safe mode even when I press F2 or F12 when the dell logo shows up. I have feeling that the hard drive failed but I want to be sure, and I already opened the case and checked if all the wires are plugged in nicely. Some side notes are, my warranty expired, and I did not install any new software or hardware in the last month. So any help would be appreciated, and if you know the cause that would help also since I don’t want a repeat of this.

Another quick thing I want to mention that might be related to this is I installed a FX5200 PCI video card last month to the system and I have not upgraded the original power supply yet.

Thank you in advance, Jay

jackshack · Answer

I'm sure that the FX 5200 does not draw enough current during normal operation to give you a problem.  I've been running a PCI FX 5200 for three years in my D2400 which has no more power than your D3000.   The seek failure on the floppy drive, especially if you don't have one, suggests that your lithium NVRAM battery has died and allowed the bios setup to reset to default.  You might try a new one as they're not expensive just to see if that will correct your problem.  When this error appears you should get a choice of F1 to continue or F2 for setup.  Do you see that message, and if so, does it allow you to get to setup?   When you press F1, does the computer boot normally?  What other symptom do you see?

jay070_c24286 · Answer

just to reconfirm, i do not have floppy drive, and i am writing what i am doing and seeing as i do it. As for other symptoms, i cant really say because everything turns on and loads normally up to the part where i should see the windows loading screen, after that nothing seems to wrk, however after pressing all the f keys one after another and waiting a minute, i was sent to a grey screen and i believe this is what you would call the bios screen. here are some quick options that caught my attention: Fast Boot:on Os install Mode:off IDE hard drive acoustics mode:bypass   in the drive config section- primary master drive:hard drive - which is set on auto for drive type and its capacity is 80000Mb primary slave drive:off   in the Hard-disk section- 1-system bios boot devices 2-usb device(not installed)   in the boot seq section- hard disk drive c,IDE cdrom, and floppy device are all checked   in the Power mangement section- Suspend Mode S3 AC power recovery:off low power mode:disabled   in the system event log section- current event log status:unread   Now after exiting the grey screen by pressing esc and leave without saving my computer turned on. i saved all of my data to a usb and turned my comp. off and turned it back on. i got the same seek failure message and i still cant go back to the grey screen.

jackshack · Answer

From what you have written I gather that it is possible for you to get to bios setup by pressing the F2 key, or some key, at the point it asks for it.  The computer fails to boot, but the bios seems to detect the hard drive.  You may have a hard drive problem, but you haven't quoted any errors to back up that suspicion.  If your hard drive has failed you normally get an error stating that there is no bootable device available.  If there is an error reported by the hard drive you may get a blue screen with an error code.  If your computer is set to boot from a USB device you will usually get no error message right away because the computer is waiting for a response from a USB device.   You need to get back to setup and change the boot order of your devices so that the CD ROM drive is the first one tried, followed by the hard disk drive.  When you have done this, locate your Dell Resource Disk, put it in the CD drive, and allow it to boot.  When it loads choose Diagnostics and run the extended tests.  The results from these should allow you to determine if the hard drive is the problem.  You may also get some clues from the diagnostic LEDs on the back of the computer.  You should have four green LEDs.  If any are yellow, the order of the colors will give clues that can be read in the Advanced Troubleshooting section of your service guide, which can be found here:   http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim3000/en/SM/index.htm

tr4 · Answer

It won't fix your problem but uncheck the floppy boot option in bios . It only adds to the confusion.

jay070_c24286 · Answer

i started the extended 32bit scan and it is up to 70%, but i though some things were noting:

1) to restate that whenever i got into the bios state or boot menu it was after pressing f2 or f12 during the screen with the messageseek error, and those menus came up after waiting 1 or 2 min.

2) even after unchecking the floppy drive option on boot sequence as tr4 suggessted and placing the cd rom sequence before the hard drive in the boot menu, on the next reboot, the cd did not load and i say the seek error message. and the way i got the resource cd to work was by hitting f12 and choosing boot from cd rom from the boot menu.

3) the 4 lights that are "A B C D" are all green

i will post later on what the extended scan found.

and thank you again for the ongoing help.

the extended scan found no errors

i used the f12 key to boot back into normal windows, and i started uninstalling software, one after another to see if there was a software issue, and after i uninstalled "Zerospyware" everything went back to normal. Now that i think about it i do remember updating the definations for the program before shutting down the pc. Well anyways, thanks for all the help and ideas, they informed me of potential future problems!:smileyvery-happy:

Message Edited by jay070 on 12-17-2007 12:05 AM

Message Edited by jay070 on 12-17-2007 12:59 AM

Message Edited by jay070 on 12-17-2007 04:11 PM

Storage, Drives & Media

diskette drive 0 seek failure

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