primary drive 1 not found

[lesio]

hi,
when I power up my pc I am getting this message
"diskette drive 0 seek failure.
primary drive 1 not found
strike F1 key to continue...."

I have win xp home ed. with one hd - 160 gb; P4 2.8 GHz; Dell
when I strike F1 my system starts normally
what's wrong? and how serious it is?

PS. recently my system restarted itself few times during powering up -
before F1 message showed up
two problems are connected?

please educate me, thnx

 

[sgopus]

At first thought, I would look if you have set your floppy as the first boot
device, if this is not the case, then I suggest you replace your HD ASAP, as
it appears it's getting ready to fail, seek errors usually mean, drive head
is failing or dirty, and there is no way to clean it, just replace it, I
strongly urge you to make a drive clone of your primary drive before you
insert the new one in place, it will save lots of problems later. one
suggestion for software is Acronis True Image, get the latest version.

 

[lesio]

floppy is not installed at all and mentioned in the BIOS as a boot device
(?!?)
thanks for the heads up with the HD
I've made already copies on my other HD

 

[philo]

floppy is not installed at all and mentioned in the BIOS as a boot device
(?!?)
thanks for the heads up with the HD
I've made already copies on my other HD

Looks like you need a new cmos battery
as your bios settings are apparently not being held

 

[sgopus]

Your sentence is confusing, are you saying the floppy is mentioned as the
boot device? or it's not mentioned?

in either case your other issue might be related, if the hd can't be found
to write temp files or save data, windows might reboot on it's own, how old
is your system?

 

[lesio]

system is maybe 4-5 years old - last time they made P4 3.0 GHz (not 2.8)
I double checked BIOS for floppy -
floppy was shown in BIOS but not as a boot device - I've marked it "off" and
now system does not look for it
I also changed my boot sequence to 1 HD, 2 CD-ROM so my system goes straight
to primary HD (I just did not know what else to do)
anyway, PC behaves normally (so far)
I've heard from other source about CMOS battery possibility - I will test it
if you do not hear from it means that the system got stable
thanks for all input
lb

 

[lesio]

what do you think about Hirens BootCD?
friend recommended; I ran some HD test - nothing negative came back
is it reliable tool?
my system is still stable

 

[sgopus]

CMOS Battery has nothing to do with the drive hardware ie seek failure, the
battery only keeps the settings on CMOS and date current, default CMOS
settings will still fine the drive just fine. different drives fail at a
varied rate, at the age of your system, I would suspect your drive is getting
ready to fail, a general saying, (it's not if it will fail, but when!) being
prepared is being forearmed, having backups and new drive ready is better
than being caught without backups and a dead drive you can't get your data
from.

It's your call!