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How To Fix Diskette Drive 0 Seek Failure

I was given a Dell Inspiron-530 Desktop. A Vista Home Basic, Intel Celeron CPU 450 @ 2.20 GHz, 288GB hard drive and 1GB RAM.

It was an old desktop owned by a late neighbour. When I turned it on, it would give an error message:

Diskette drive 0 seek failure
Press F1 to continue, F2 to enter SETUP

dell-vista-diskette-drive-0-seek-failure-f1-continue-f2-setup

F1 will boot into Windows and F2 goes into the BIOS setup.

A little research online and I found out the problem was more likely a floppy disk error. This computer has no floppy drive. So I went into the BIOS to try to disable it.

So I pressed F2.

On the first screen, I used the arrow keys to move to the line Standard CMOS Features and pressed Enter.

phoenix-award-bios-standard-cmos-features

On the next screen, I used the arrow keys to scroll down and highlight Drive A [1.44M, 3.5 in.] and pressed Enter.

phoenix-award-bios-setup-utility

Then a small window opened giving me the option to disable the drive. I used the arrow key to move the little square dot up from 1.44M to 3.5 in. To None, then pressed Enter.

select-1.44m, 3.5in-or-none

Then I clicked on F10. I got the message SAVE to CMOS and EXIT (Y/N). Y

Type Y for yes or N for No. The Y was already there so I just pressed Enter.

save-to-cmos-and-exit-yes-or-no

This rebooted the computer automatically and since it wasn’t looking for a floppy disk that wasn’t there I didn’t get the error message.

Is anybody still using Vista? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

2 thoughts on “How To Fix Diskette Drive 0 Seek Failure”

  1. I still use a 530 .Intel Core Duo E8600 3.33ghz , 8gb ram and a Samsung 870 ssd . It runs Windows 10 very well .

    1. Hey Fred,

      I’m not at all surprised to hear that your machine runs Windows 10 very well, the Intel E8600 was (is) a darn fine CPU. I used to have an old box running XP with the same processor.

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