Can't boot off drive or floppym, but can cdrom on Armada M300

I hope someone can help me, but I suspect this unit is beyond it.

My nephew has an Armada M300 that turns on, but reports 1782-Disk
Controller Error. I then get something about PXE-6
media-something-failure, although no network cables are conected.
Finally, I get the, "Non-System disk or disk error..." message even
with a disk in the floppy drive.

I can boot off the cdrom, but can't access the floppy drive. I went
into the bios and set it to boot off floppy first, makes no
difference. If cdrom is in, it boots to it, if not, no go.

I tried to reinstall Win98 just to see what the scandisk would reveal
and I get a run-time error R6003 - integer divide by 0 error message.

Suggestions?

Damian

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 02:12:37 GMT, Damian wrote:

I hope someone can help me, but I suspect this unit is beyond it.

My nephew has an Armada M300 that turns on, but reports 1782-Disk
Controller Error. I then get something about PXE-6
media-something-failure, although no network cables are conected.
Finally, I get the, "Non-System disk or disk error..." message even
with a disk in the floppy drive.

I can boot off the cdrom, but can't access the floppy drive. I went
into the bios and set it to boot off floppy first, makes no
difference. If cdrom is in, it boots to it, if not, no go.

I tried to reinstall Win98 just to see what the scandisk would reveal
and I get a run-time error R6003 - integer divide by 0 error message.


I took it to where he got it today, and after swapping out the
hard-drive, we were able to access it, so it looks like it's not the
motherboard that is at fault. Now the question is: can any brand of
notebook hard drive be used? I mean, within the parameters of
gigabytes and the OS's ability to see it all? These things are
expensive for the amount of space you get.

Damian