Mystery Laptop (Compaq Presario 1060) Problem

Did you take your laptop through a dust storm?

Try cleaning them both.

- Mike

Del

you

Uh, sorry to seem snarky, but just replace the freakin' floppy drive, it's like $13. Same with the CD drive. One hour of labor costs more than both of these hardware devices combined. Floppy drives are crap, nobody uses them any more in fact there is not a single laptop on the market today which has an internal floppy drive. The reason nobody uses them is because they are unreliable, both the hardware and the media are exposed to the external environment at all times.

Replace the CD drive, and blow $59 for a USB flash drive instead of replacing the floppy.

Just my 2 cents.

They're plenty reliable, I have some going on 15 years old that still work fine. The reason nobody uses them anymore is that the amount of data they store is tiny, I have a USB stick about 1/4 the size of a stick of chewing gum on my keyring that holds about 700 1.44mb floppies worth of data.

Heck, and I thought this was a *repair* group. :) Well, OK, I guess replacing drives to repair the laptop qualifies but the most likely explanation for his problems are that they got dirty. And that's a few minutes and not of your very valuable time. ;-)

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If my popup toaster or other $8 appliance dies I may well poke around inside of it. But even I - who once made a living fixing small appliances and the like - don't bother now. When floppies were $200 - $300 each we fixed them. At $10 it ain't going to happen.

Yeah, but don't laptop drives typically cost more than $10? I havn't priced on in ages so I don't know..

If it were me I'd just clean them and lube them both and see what happens.

- Mike

Certainly they used to, as was the case with most laptop components. They tended to not be standard in the past, so you paid more. I was under the impression that it wasn't just laptop versus desktop, but the parts tended to be specific to a manufacturer, so there was no such thing as a "laptop floppy" but a floppy drive for Brand A and a different floppy drive for Brand B. That tends to keep prices high.

I have no idea whether that's the case in more recent years or not.

Michael

Hi,

Sorry I forgot to mention that I thoroughly cleaned both drives and I do not smoke (very bad for your health).

INTERESTING FLOPPY DRIVE TEST:

I used a program called "Sector Access" and read a string (100) of sectors starting at sector 00000000 (boot sector) into a file called "100.SEC". This has to be done in Dos mode (Windows shut down).

Then I used a program called "Proof", with the command: "PROOF 100.SEC /512". The switch "/512" tells proof to read the file in 512 byte amounts. A sector is 512 bytes. Note: I did this test on the same floppy disk on another computer and wrote down the checksums for each

512 byte amounts (they accumulate). The first sector (boot sector) was fine, but the second sector miss-matched.

Remember, I had used a Compaq diagnostic tool on the floppy drive and all tests passed (rotation speed, etc.) except the "Write/Read/Compare".

Brad

On Tue, 19 Sep 2006 18:01:03 +0000, Brad Has Frothed:

Age of unit is what 7 or so years old? My guess is coincedental failure.

Hi,

The laptop had a "stroke" while I was using it. Note: Windows booted up just fine, then something happened. Everything "froze" and there was no response to any input. I had to turn off the power. I disconnected power, removed the battery pack, and waited. Later, when I turned on the power, the only "life" I heard was the HDD spinning, nothing else was happening such as BIOS trying to read the floppy drive because that drive is the first in the boot up sequence. No display (black), no "beeps", etc.

HDD is fine because I removed it and tested it in another computer.

Thanks to everyone who tried to help.

Brad

Not sure if you mean that you've resolved this or not, but the issue sounds to be a bad motherboard or similar hardware failure. You said the HDD checks out fine, so let's leave that out.

First thing I'd probably try is if you have another stick of RAM available, swap out the current stick for a known good stick. Probably won't help a whole lot, but then again, bad RAM can cause strange things to happen.

Next, I'd suspect either a logic board or processor. Most likely your issue, especially if you can notice some visible discoloration on either part. Also going to be more expensive to repair (around $100-200 for a used logic board, if you get lucky finding one on eBay). Probably something around the same amount for a processor, though I don't have any exact figures available. If you want to get this fixed for sure (and assuming the laptop is new enough to consider repairing), probably the best bet is sending it out to a company that facilitates laptop repairs--cost will be something around $300, but that is generally a flat-rate repair. Shop around, though, and see what people offer. You may be able to perform repairs on the components on the logic board (such as a visibly damaged capacitor), but I've not attempted any logic board repair, so you're on your own.

My advice would be to first try replacing the RAM--most computer stores have a 30 day return policy, so try the new RAM and keep the packaging and receipt... that way, if it doesn't solve your problem, just return the RAM, and you can decide if you want to try to find a replacement logic board, or go some other route with the laptop.

Good luck to you,

--Doug Kelly