FDC Failure – Press F1 to continue

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Hi:
When I was booting up the computer yesterday, a message “FDC Failure – Press F1 to continue” occurred during bootup. I pressed F1. Apparently it’s a Floppy Disk Controller problem. I’ve rebooted 3 times since and did not get the message again. I’m wondering if it’s the floppy drive itself (which seems to be working ok) or something on the mother board since I don’t know what or where the floppy disk controller is. Device Manager says the floppy disk is working properly and no excalmation marks.
The computer is about 5 years old running XP Pro SP3 (up to date); 2 Ghz; 2 Gigs ram; 320 Seagate (OS) and 80 Gig Maxtor HDD’s; Spybot S&D; MalwareBytes; AVG Free (all up to date); last rebuild was about 2 years ago.
I did some research on the net but didn’t find much.Some of the forum commentors said that they could not get beyond the failure warning. Some of the links I read said it could possibly be the onboard battery (which hasn’t been changed yet). So far, I have not had any further warnings, but….
Thanks for any info.

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Ignore it unless it starts recurring. A common issue is the data cable to the FDC developing poor contacts – if it recurs, as a first step pull of the cable, one end at a time, and push it firmly back on again. Do the same with the power cable “just in case”.

Device Manager does no tests on the floppy drive whatsoever – it merely confirms that it’s connected and giving a correct response when queried. It basically tells you zilch above the functional state of the drive.

Of course it could also be the drive is about to fail – but with FDCs that’s much less likely than a cable/contact issue.

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Thanks, I’ll give the cables a try next time.

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