Failure Fixed Disk 0

Topic

New Reply

Hi, i’m trying to help out a friend with his laptop. He recieves this error at startup “no operating system. So i took his pc and tried to load a win 98 boot disk, now I see this error “Failure Fixed Disk 0”. Can someone tell me what this error is? Thanks.

Reply | Quote

Replies

Check out this site: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000389.htm%5B/url%5D

Reply | Quote

[indent]

---

…tried to load a win 98 boot disk…

---

[/indent] I’m not sure what you mean by that statement, but if you BOOT with a Win98 boot floppy, you should run FDISK and select 4 to view the partition. If FDISK doesn’t let you do that, it looks like you may have a dead hard drive on your hands. I hope he’s got a backup!

Reply | Quote

i does not recognize fdisk, so i guess hardrive is gone. can’t figure how to open to see hardrive. it’s a gateway notebook solo 5100 model.

Reply | Quote

I have cmos booting from bootable cd. It sees the hardrive but again I still receive same error message. I loaded norton 2003 to check for viruses. nothing. I have to believe the hardrive is gone. I removed and installed back the hardrive and nothing. I called gateway and they do not have hardrive replacement. They pointed me to another place. I guess no luck.

Reply | Quote

While you’re very possibly right that “it’s gone”, I’m a little confused by your answers. You don’t need a boot disk to get to the cmos. when the computer first boots, it should say “hit delete (or f2, maybe) to enter setup” or something similar, and then you enter the bios, and check to see what it says about recognizing a hard drive. Then you say “…bootable cd….sees the harddrive”. Can you get a c: prompt? What do you mean it sees the harddrive? Hope I’m not beating a dead hard drive here, but I’m not entirely convinced by your answers that it’s dead. (or maybe I’m just a hopeless optimist….)

kip

Reply | Quote

sorry guys I guess i should have written my answer more correctly. I checked cmos correctly, I hit F2 for setup and noticed that it recognized the 10 gig hardrive. Then what i did is insert a win 98 boot disk to get into fdisk. It cannot find fdisk, even though it is present on the diskette. Also when booting up, it makes a sound like a squeeking car brakes. I’m totally convinced that the hard drive is gone. I checked ebay and found the same one for 29.99. I sent the person an email asking him if it is in working condition so that I can buy it.

Reply | Quote

Wait a minute. [indent]

---

It cannot find fdisk, even though it is present on the diskette

---

[/indent]If you boot from the floppy and fdisk is on the floppy and you type fdisk, do you get something like ‘fdisk’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

If that’s the case, then you will probably need to specify the entire path to fdisk, something along the lines of a:subdirectoryfdisk.exe (or .com I forget which)

If I am misunderstanding what you said, then could you please clarify that statement.

Reply | Quote

I will check, perhaps you are correct. When I get home tonight I will check. Thanks.

Reply | Quote

Just a thought or three: is the laptop BIOS boot order set to boot first from the floppy before the HDD or CD-ROM? Can you do a DIR from the a:> prompt and see fdisk in the list? Is the boot floppy a known good working one: try it in another machine, and try another copy of a boot disk. Provided the floppy drive itself is OK as well as the floppy disk, then typing fdisk at the a:> prompt should be sufficient. Caveat: brain fade may be making me miss something obvious or getting the wrong end of the stick! Good luck.

Reply | Quote

Ok, yup now it sounds like a dead disk. just thought I’d check, though.

Good luck on eBay.

kip

Reply | Quote