[072707]

Toshiba Satellite Pro 4200 series Windows 2000 Professional sp4

When I boot the machine I get "Disk error"; "Press any key to restart".

note: I have had a history of problems with this machine not recognizing floppy disks. I had not tried to use a floppy in it in some time until today. When I did it gave me the typical floppy problem of "Disk is not formatted; would you like to format it". Sometimes the floppy drive would work sometimes I would get the aforementioned message and it would not work.

Today I ran into the floppy disk problem so I took it out and rebooted and now I keep getting "Disk error"; "Press any key to restart". If I leave the machine on after a boot failure the floppy drive light keeps coming on periodically and then it outputs another "Disk error"; "Press any key to restart" message to the screen.

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Go into the BIOS and change the boot order to boot off the Hard Drive first as opposed to the floppy.

[Neil Jones]

Go into the BIOS and change the boot order to boot off the Hard Drive first as opposed to the floppy.

[072707]

Thankyou for replying.

It has been a long while, if ever, since I have looked in the bios on this machine. The startup screen says "press [F2] for the boot device selection menu". When I press F2 it gives:

Select boot device
[c]: cd-rom
[f]: fdd
[b]: built-inn hdd
[d]: default system setup device
Press [c],[f],[b], or [d].

When I press any of the indicated keys the machine just beeps and does nothing.

I have also tried pressing some, but not all, of the other F keys just after restarting the machine, but they have no affect.

[072707]

I removed the hard drive, which seems to be stuck in a loop(-- -- -------) "looking" for something, and USB connected it to an XP sp2 machine. I wanted to run chkdsk on it from the XP machine, but it just gets stuck in that loop again(-- -- -------). The XP machine will not show the drive in windows explorer so that I can try to do anything with it.

How can I get this drive to stop looping(-- -- -------) so that I can chkdsk it, or maybe, just reformat it. I have backups of it so I will just reformat it, but I can't access it via the xp machine. It does not show up. The machine does make a sound when I connect the drive, and earlier it even said "detected hardware and installed", etc, but ultimately I can not "see" the drive to on the XP machine in order to try to chkdsk or reformat it.

Incidentally, once I removed the aforementioned hard drive I was able to run the windows 2000 Professional installation CD, but I just exited the installation because the hard drive itself is still malfunctioning.

http://www.geekstogo...ne-t169014.html

[shard92]

Sounds like your hard drive is just plain bad... if you can't get a computer to boot with it in the system you may be sol.... hopefully there is nothing too important on it. If there is you could try sending it in to professional data recovery service but it will be expensive ( usually around $100 to look at it and hundred to thousands to recover )