In search of bright ideas (probably another reformatting thread . . . )

[Mandi]

My laptop has been giving me the BSOD once or twice a day recently. I even got it upon booting this AM. My gut feeling is it could use a really good reformatting, but there's a problem. About 18 months ago, I got a basic boot sector virus from a floppy disc.

Reversing it and cleaning up seemed easy enough and everything worked as expected after that . . . except my floppy drive. It never worked again. I feel that's just a little too coincidental to be a strict hardware problem . . . but living on a LAN (with floppy drive access at another machine) and having nearly everything on CD-ROMs these days has made a floppy drive slacker out of me, and I've never taken the time to see what I could do about the floppy drive.

Now that I need to reformat, I am going to need that A drive for recovering CD-ROM drivers - and therein lies the problem. ***Maybe*** the reformat will be enough healing of whatever didn't get fixed back in the virus thing that I'll have the A drive back afterwards, but I sure am not gonna bet my entire OS on it! Obviously I won't be able to access the LAN until I've reinstalled my OS and all the network drivers too.

I am going to try a basic reinstall of Win98 before I pick up the big guns and reformat, and maybe that'll fix things up. But if not, I could use some bright ideas about this machine's floppy drive.

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What is considered getting close to "full" on a hard drive? Is it a straight amount of memory you leave free, or is it more of a relational thing - x% of the overall drive?

TIA . . .

[0degree]

Here is an idea that might help (assuming you are using Windows98):
You shoulod check your BIOS settings and see if you can make your CD-ROM drive bootable and hence bypassing the need for a floppy boot disk. If it can be done, you should be able to reach the win98 installation screen before going into the DOS environment first. If your laptop is relatively new, this option is most likely present.

What is considered getting close to "full" on a hard drive? Is it a straight amount of memory you leave free, or is it more of a relational thing - x% of the overall drive?

Sorry not sure of the answer to this one.

Tony.

[robpitt]

You could try booting from your floppy now before doing anything else. (Though you may need to adjust your bios boot sequnce to A then C to do this).

Anyway if you can't boot directly from a floppy now, reformating the hard drive won't change anything. If your floppy can't boot it's almost certainly a hardware fault and will require a repair job.

Of course if you can boot from CD as suggested by Tony then at least you can get by with your broken floppy for a bit longer.

Rob

[Dunx]

Yes, do try booting from the floppy. It could be that Windows is just really, really confused.

An old Gateway desktop machine I used to have stopped reading floppies reliably. It was particularly bad on 720k 3.5" discs, which was irritating because this was the only discs which my Acorn Archimedes could use (this was a while ago, you may gather).

I'd always assumed that it was a broken floppy drive, but when I finally got around to swapping the old one out it made no difference.

However, when I reformatted the hard disc to reinstall Windows before handing the machine on it would quite happily read any floppy I put in the drive, 720k as well as 1.44M.

So, it could well be just corrupt drivers.

[Mandi]

I want to reformat due to system errors and general software weirdness, not because the floppy drive won't read. (Actually, the error is "can't find drive" but y'all probably knew that!) Last night's fun was losing communication with the keyboard, mid forum-posting :\\ - I think it's just developed some seriously corrupted drivers.

I never tried booting from the floppy since the malfunction, that's a worthy idea, thanks! And I appreciate the advice about booting from the CD-ROM, that's news to me. Crossing my fingers that it will work if it comes to that.

Anyone have insights on what's considered "full"?

Thanks again, everyone!

[Mandi]

Just wanted to drop in a thanks for the suggestion to go ahead and try to boot from the floppy anyway - it did work! So I obviously have a bunch of bungled drivers, and am going to work from that angle first.

[Mandi]

Thanks especially to Tony for the instructions on how to boot from the CD-ROM, it worked like a dream. I did end up needing to reformat, basic reinstall didn't do much more than act as a session bandaid :( .

Upon reconfiguring my hardware, the system wasn't able to finger my monitor type. Ack, I never thought about what "kind" of monitor the laptop has. It has the kind that doubles as a lid and airline book holder, ya know??

Anyway, without a special model name, I have that lovely 16 color, 640x400 display. Umm, yes . . . that'll make graphic design a breeze! LOL :D.

So, where would one find that sort of info listed, since it's not like a desktop monitor with all that info laid out in black and white on the cover?

Full disk is no longer an issue, since I had to go reformat. Thankfully, I was able to suck off all the important data via LAN to my husband new desktop . . . with a 60 gig HD, he can move over and share (file storage) for a little bit. I'll be picky about what I put back on my own machine. He has a CD burner, I think I am going to put our important setup files on one of those, and maybe use the zip drive for client files and such.

TIA as always.

[Bob]

Hi Mandi,

Everytime that has happened to me, which were all on desktops BTW, it had nothing to do with the monitor, but rather with the dirvers for the computers graphics card or chip.

I have always been able to fix it by visiting the manufacturers web site and downloading some drivers and installing them till one works.

Don't know if this will help, but Good Luck :)

Have a Good One
Bob

- What I know about hardware, could be stored in my dogs brain :P -

[0degree]

It's good to see my suggestion helped you :)

I agree with Bob in that you should visit the manufacturer's website and download the latest drivers for both the video card AND the monitor type. Unlike desktop monitors, laptop screens need a little more setting up. I once got away w/o using the appropriate monitor driver on my ex Dell laptop (but had the correct video driver). However, I could not get a full screen view due to this. I think I selected "SVGA Laptop Display" or something similar. But like I said, use the manufacturer's drivers for best results (select the appropriate laptop's model and the manufacturer should be able to tell which screen you have).

Good Luck!
Tony.

P.S. With laptops, the correct video driver will usually configure the screen for you since you can't physically change the video card or the laptop's screen.

[Mandi]

I am once again back on a happy, healthy laptop . . . fix included a new floppy drive (which was cheap, I should have done it a long time ago, kicking myself for putting that off!) and an updated BIOS from Dell, which mysteriously took care of the monitor issue.

Not that we can all stop everything and do it regularly (oh, the pain . . ) but I cannot BELIEVE how much zippier everything is after a nice clean reformat and reinstall of all my goodies. I am good about regular disk maintenance too, but it had really become choked with "weeds" in there!

Took the reinstall opportunity to upgrade to Office 2000 Pro and a newer Norton's AV. I'm giving Tiny Personal Firewall a try instead of Zone Alarm this time too. Seems like a good program, if anyone else has been thinking about it. Can't beat the footprint! A recent issue with being able to neither use nor update nor reinstall nor delete IE 5 was solved with all the fresh software as well.

My thanks again for all the excellent advice. My coffee mug and I salute you :)!