What a great forum! I hope someone can help me. I have a PC that I received the message "1782 fixed disk controller failure". I installed another hard disk and received the same message. Now when I put the hard disk that I installed after receiving the message (it has some important data on it) back in the PC I took it out of I get the same message! Did I screw up that hard drive by putting it in the "bad" machine? Any help would be much appreciated.

When does the message appear?
Did you check for a virus?

The message appears soon after I turn the PC on. It looks like it is running the usual POST tests then it says starting Windows 95 then right after that the message appears. Then I am unable to do anything except turn the PC off.

Look for bent or broken pins on the drive connector (both ends drive and motherboard), try a different IDE cable and of course the virus scan.

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

Thanks for the ideas. I checked all the pins and tried another cable. I am unable to run a virus scan because the system is not recognizing the c drive. When the cable is not plugged into the mother board it does recognize there is no fixed disk present, but when I plug it in it just gives me the same message. It seems like it is trying to find the hard drive because the light comes on. Any other ideas? Thanks I appreciate the help.

The hard drive may have an infected master boot record.
To get rid of it, insert the Windows boot disk, start up, select 'Start Without CD-ROM Support', press Enter, type c: at the A:\> prompt, press Enter, type fdisk /mbr at the C:\> prompt (note the space between fdisk and the /), press Enter.
If that does not work, restart with the Windows boot disk inserted, select 'Start W/O CD-ROM Support', type sys c: at the A:\> prompt, press Enter.
If still no luck, insert the antivirus program's boot disk before starting up, and try getting rid of the virus with it. Before doing this, you may want to update the boot disk's antivirus files on another computer.

You may have to do the same thing with the other HD.