restart causes FDC failure

Even with windows power management off, I had another failure. It seems that if anything causes a restart other than the user doing a proper windows shutdown or restart, the system loses the FDC.


I had been able to restore the FDC by disabling it in the bios, booting to windows then doing a proper shutdown, re-enabling the FDC.

Now I cant get windows to start ( except in safe mode) and windows doesn't load driver for cd rom, and since this also resulted in FDC failure, I cant boot to a floppy and re-installl windows.

If the FDC keeps being lost but then is restored ( perhaps the driver?) by a windows shutdown/restart, then is it a windows problem, not hardware? I've tried 2 windows re-installations already.

Shouldnt the system be able to be re-started by ctrl-alt-del without losing the FDC ?

Any ideas on how I can get the FDC working from only the c:\ prompt without either floppy or cd rom drives?

Also when in bios, while the cd rom is showing as on the 2nd IDE controller, the diagnostic ctl-alt-d shows nothing on the 2nd controller.