Daily Quiz: Troubleshooting 101

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Tim can't use his floppy drive. When he turns the computer on, the floppy drive light stays continuously on.
and when he tries to use it in Windows, with a disk in, it tells him "please insert a disk into drive A:"

why can't he use his floppy drive?
 
problem: timmy has just bought a brand new 80gb ide hdd. he is trying to install it in a p1 system as primary master with only a cd-rom as secondary master in the way of other ide devices. the computer has a 200w psu. he has checked that all connections are correct and that his jumpers are correct but no matter what he can't seem to get the drive to work.

question: what is the most likely cause of his hdd not working and if possible what is the solution?

edit: aside from hdd failure
 
In older PCs BIOS doesn't support hard drives over 8 GB even though the hard drive is correctly recognized on setup. So, it will be correctly recognized on setup but when you format it, it will only format as 8 GB. This problem is caused by a BIOS limitation, similar to the famous 504 MB limit that existed many years ago.

There are two solutions for this problem:

1. BIOS upgrade: This is the best option. If your motherboard uses a Flash-ROM chip you can reprogram it in order to solve this limitation.

2. If the ROM memory from your motherboard doesn't allow an upgrade the solution is to use a special formatting software (a.k.a. Disk Manager) which is distributed by the hard drive manufacturer. This program formats the hard drive and installs a driver on the hard disk's MBR and boot sector which is loaded every time you turn your PC on before loading the operating system, allowing to have access to the full capacity of the hard drive.
 
I'm going to pass this turn to someone else. I started this thread and i'd like everyone to get a turn... So whomever wants next, take it...

By the way, that was a good one...
 
Ok. I will take this one to keep it going.

Timmy just bought a new PCI Card, after installing it and rebooting his PC he finds that it's simply not working. He goes back to "Best Buy" where he bought it and tells the "sales person" whom sold it to him that it's not working. The sales person at "Best Buy" tells him that it's got to be an IRQ problem and that he should start there.

Q: Is the sale person from "Best Buy" correct? If yes why? If no Why?
 
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