We are do-it-yourselfers working with Spacewalker AK31 board.

We've come to the moment of truth---with not much help from the "friendly user's guides" from boardmaker welcoming DIY types.

We worked out the "floppy disk fail" from the BIOS (we hope), and now we see the FDD motor light turn on about the time it should. A bootable disk is loaded; made from "format a:/s" from another PC running W98 (we verified it works). Now the message is "Disk I/O error...replace the disk" etc.

Potential problem: new FDD not working
Test for solution: took known working FDD from that other PC, used its own ribbon cable to connect to board, and we see same message

Potential problem: mainboard defect
Test for solution: didn't do it (yet)...we dread idea of running down to the store and get a replacement board; popping CPU, cards and connectors; then seeing how the replacement board works (at least a day). Have thought of also testing I/O to HDD with loaded O/S taken from other PC, just to see how that's working. System also has new CD/RW we installed, but attempt to boot from CD using "HP Recovery" disks did not work ("Booting from ATAPI CDROM: DISK BOOT FAILURE...")

There must be a simpler solution than believing that data transfer between board and FDD is due to damaged hardware.



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Mavi Gozler

You can get into the BIOS Setup?

Check and make sure that the floppy is enabled and also check the connectors on the floppy making sure that it is in correctly (stripe equals Pin 1) and that it is not off by a pin, look for bent pins on the motherboard connector.

As for the the CD-ROM , make sure it is the first thing listed in the boot order and if you are hoping to load your operating system from the HP recovery disk....IT WON"T WORK (it is an restore disk for HP products only, keyed to a "tattoo" in the HP BIOS and it may not even boot if tried in another system)

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mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.

Thanks mjc.


You can get into the BIOS Setup?

That represented no problem


Check and make sure that the floppy is enabled and also check the connectors on the floppy making sure that it is in correctly (stripe equals Pin 1) and that it is not off by a pin, look for bent pins on the motherboard connector.

We did have some problems with the FDD cable, in terms of orienting it at both connectors (no easy guides on the connectors and no help from the DIY guide!), not to mention whether we should use the connector in the middle of the cable or after the twist. Pin numbering not evident on FDD. However, with most configurations we tried, BIOS always reports "floppy disk fails" with an error number (40), and there seems to be only one config we tried where we don't see the BIOS error message, and it proceeds on to try to boot from floppy.


As for the the CD-ROM , make sure it is the first thing listed in the boot order and if you are hoping to load your operating system from the HP recovery disk....IT WON"T WORK (it is an restore disk for HP products only, keyed to a "tattoo" in the HP BIOS and it may not even boot if tried in another system)

Since we have no legit W9x install CD (only this HP "recovery" CD), setting a boot from there is now not going to help us. Will still make an effort to determine where the FDD boot problem lies.



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Mavi Gozler

Just a note to indicate *this* problem solved.

How?

It seems the system disk made from the HP WinOS (using virtual DOS "format a:/s") was providing the message "Disk I/O error" from the boot sector. It could be that HP doesn't even allow a bare system on a floppy to run from another PC! HP has strange notions of piracy, if that's the case.

We were able to boot from FDD using some other system disk, so there is no hardware conflict/failure. TG


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Mavi Gozler

what if you have nothing on the hard drive? I was asked to look at a pc that was reformatted then came up a smart failure impending. Press F1 to continue. when I do this Disk I/O error comes up. any suggestions.