I have a Dell Dimension 8400 and I am using Windows XP Professional. The system is several years old and I have had no problems until recently. Now I am not able to complete the boot up process. I receive an error message entitled "Diskette Drive 0 Failure." It also says "Seek Failure." I have gone to Dell.com and followed each of their suggested recovery processes except for reinstalling Windows - which I don't want to do. Can anyone help me?

Sounds like the drive or the drive controller is bad. You might try getting a new drive, installing it as the primary and putting the existing drive as secondary. Then either install Windows or use your Recovery disk to load the OS on the new drive, then see if you can access the files from the old one.

Diskette Drive 0 Failure

Do you possibly have a diskette in floppy drive, if so, it may be trying to read it but the floppy drive controller (as mentioned above) is bad

Just make sure you do not have floppy in drive and as it seems to have issue, you may want to enter the BIOS and disable floppy as 1st/2nd boot device and set the CD rom to boot first then the hard drive