Hi all,
my PC just passed away ... urgently looking for a PC repair lab in or around Zurich to take it to for help. all suggestions / recoms highly appreciated!

thx

K

What's up with it? Did it just die? Or does it switch on and give bleeps?

gets stuck during boot sequence, even before windows starts up, giving me a DOS-like screen with "floppy disk(s) fail (40)" message, and refuses to budge...

You don't have a disk in the drive do you? Know repair technicians back home that have done a 300 mile round trip to a client just to take a disk out .....

dont even have a floppy drive... only 1 dvd drive, and its empty...

Google your error message (put the entire line in quotation marks) - there appears to be plenty of help available.

Read a couple and it seems that either the cable to your drive is loose, or the floppy drive is faulty. If you don't have a floppy drive, or you suspect it's faulty, the resolution suggested is to go into the BIOS and disable the drive - pretty easy and your PC manual should tell you how to access the BIOS.

Hope it helps ...

will try, thx!

Unplug the pc, open up the case and have a look around inside. It's probably full of dust so don't do it on your best carpet. Make sure all the cables are fully pressed home, and basically check that all the components are firmly attached.

did that. not so dusty, actually - have done this before now and then... will go thru cables one by one, maybe it will help.
thx :-)

That's normally a loose floppy cable or a reversed one when building a PC.

If you don't have a floppy go into the bios and look for a setting about "boot" which says ignore errors on "boot"

Unless......

Might be you're mainboard battery has gone and reset the bios settings back to the original ones. A battery is about £3 in the UK and dead simple to replace. It's round and silver about the size of a 10p piece. You don't need it for the PC to work, but you'll end up going through this routine each time you disconnect power from the PC. They normally last about 2-3 years

Which means you have to set up the mainboard in the main page and ensure it shows no floppy drive and your hard disks are correctly setup or on "auto" + the annoying one, date +time.

I thought you could bypass this by hitting a key? f2, escape etc try a few random ones.

Good news is this is very cheap to fix!

It has been a very long time since I did any PC repair stuff, but I remember that if a PC suddenly started trying to boot from a floppy the following 3 reasons were most frequent:

1. Someone fiddled in the bios
2. Floppy disk was in the drive through bootup
3. No bootable harddisk was found

Now, if we rule out 1 and 2 (I assume you didn't alter anything in the bios), that leaves us with an issue related to the hard disk. The first thing I would do, as was already recommended is to check if the cables to the hard drive are plugged in correctly. If that doesn't help, then it might be a HDD faliure and you should really seek professional help.

This is definately no 1 IMHO, possibly dead battery (type 40 error is definately floppy) which would point to reset bios rather than HDD fail.

problem persists despite all efforts.
thx for all the help though.
still - if anyone can recommend a decent PC lab in/around Zurich...?
K

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/de...h&l=en&~ck=geo

buy a laptop with the three zear pickup service. Or you could wait for PCDesigns, I'm surprised he hasn't popped in to say hello yet.

I have not seen any answers to the actual question for where a pc repair shop is, instead everyone seems to think they can fix your pc by giving you all sorts of crazy ideas.

Hi,
email me directly. I am coming to zurich in a few days and can help you out if you wish.

wow what a coincidence!!
Being Swiss national day, I took a day off to be with the kids in Bern (yawn) and could not believe it was a ghost town.
Geeze, am I becoming more Swiss than a real Swiss native? Our kids had flags, I wore red AND we spent money on parking at the zoo....
Oh well maybe next year.