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Says insert floppy in drive a

18 years ago

When daughter tries to boot up she gets the above message.

It won't boot up to windows just this message. There is no floppy in the drive. Running XP, i had her scan for virus and spyware. The only thing different is telephone man hooked up new modem for her cable internet.

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Comments (8)

fruitjarfla
18 years ago
Did Larry The Cable Guy touch the keyboard when installing the modem or use some software for the installation? If that occurred and could be the cause of the change, you might call the cable company to do a fix. Otherwise, the company would not be aware that the tech made the change. Here's one Microsoft page that discusses "Insert floppy in drive A."

Here is a link that might be useful: MS Help and Support
patches_02
Original Author
18 years ago
Can't get to the part that says the resolution because it won't boot up to windows. When she turns it on she gets the message to insert floppy boot disk to continue, no other window or option. She said, the cable man didn't do anything other then swap out the modem. She's tried rebooting several times but no luck, same message. Could the bios got messed up to tell it to boot from floppy?
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owbist
18 years ago
Are you comfortable going into the BIOS patches? If so you can swap the startup sequence for the floppy, hard drive and CD player. I have the floppy set to last these days as it is almost a historic piece of equipment.

Failing that you can insert your Winows XP disk and startup, you can then do a repair install. This will not cause you to lose any programs or data but you will definitely need to get all MS updates issued since your version of XP was created.
patches_02
Original Author
18 years ago
thanks i went into bios like you suggested and changed it and it stays good for awhile but if it's been shut down and turned on more then two times i get the same message insert disk in drive a.
patches_02
Original Author
18 years ago
looked at the boot order and it says
quick boot disabled
First boot device =ATAP I CDROM
Second boot device = FLOPPY
Third boot device = FLOPTICAL
Fourth boot device = 1st IDE HD

in what order should they be?
Thanks
johnkr
18 years ago
I don't think the boot order would cause the error. If there is no bootable CD in the CD-ROM drive the sequence will move to the Floppy. If there is no bootable floppy in the drive it will move to the next device in the boot order and so on. Eventually it will get to the IDE HD.

I think the problem is with the hard drive. If the BIOS doesn't find a bootable OS on the hard drive it may return to the floppy and request a boot disk.

I would first check the IDE cable connection at the hard drive and motherboard connectors. The problem could be a loose cable resulting in an intermittent connection. Perhaps the computer was bumped, loosening the connection.

The problem can also be the hard drive itself. The drive can be failing and having trouble reading files, or the files can be starting to get corrupt. Booting from the installation CD and running chkdsk from the recovery console would be a good idea.
owbist
18 years ago
Patches if this were me I would move the IDE hard drive up to the second choice. The order you have it set to still calls for the floppy drive to be searched before the hard drive. So my order would be CDROM, IDE, floppy and nothing else.
johnkr
18 years ago
Owbist, the boot sequence determines the order in which bootable devices are checked (by the BIOS) for an operating system. Each device is checked in the sequence order until bootable media is detected.
If you list the CD-ROM as the first device, the BIOS will look for bootable media in the CD-ROM each time the computer is started up. If it finds a bootable CD, the system will prompt the user to press a key to boot from the CD-ROM and wait a period of time for a reply.
I set my boot sequence to check the IDE HD first as that is the device I want to boot from about 99.99% of the time. Why waste start-up time checking CD/DVD drives and floppy drives for bootable media? If you need to boot from a CD, as is the case when you are installing a new OS from scratch, you can always reset the BIOS boot sequence.

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