evening all,

before we get started i might just mention this is not my pc but my brother's, hes a complete technophobe and therefore i'm not entirely sure of the pre-amble to this problem

anyway down to business, on startup the computer reports a floppy disk drive error (40) despite the fact that the pc does not have a floppy drive, just a bog standard dvd drive. pressing F1 clears this and windows (xp) starts up. on clicking the my computer folder it takes a good 40 secs to find all the drives with c: being hdd and a: being floppy. it does not contain D: which i would assume would be the dvd drive. the light on the front of the dvd is flashing however pressing eject doesnt seem to work. ive opened the case and all everything seems to be connected and ive tried disconnecting and reconnecting the cables to the mobo. other side issues are that system restore cannot create a restore point and there are yellow exclamation marks next to microsoft kernel audio splitter and microsoft audio kernel wave audio mixer in the hardware tab of system info, therfore there is no audio from the speakers. im not sure if this is registry damage or if these problems are even related, if anybody has any idea why this has happend then let me know as i'm getting serious earache over this lol

thanx, any questions lety me know

Tony:

Let's try a bit of troubleshooting. Try booting the PC without the DVD drive installed. Does the floppy drive error still come up?

If it does, try disconnecting the floppy drive (and leave the DVD drive disconnected) and reboot. Do you still get the floppy drive error?

Next, get hold of a driver for the DVD drive - Google for the make and model, which should be on the drive's case.

I don't think that the audio problem is related: it's probably just that your brother doesn't have the correct drivers loaded for his sound card/onboard sound.

When you've done all this, get back to us!

You will need to enter the BIOS and disable the floppy disk drive option if it is enabled.