So lately, every time I am starting up the PC I get to this black screen after the compaq screen appears, and my tower makes two beeping noises. It then says a bunch of stuff and near the bottom it says Drive error: diskette A error.

And then press F1 to setup or press F2 to advance basically. I always just press F2 and it continues on loading for me and then I just get to my usual desktop and carry on. But it had been doing this exact same thing before for a while, and then one day it performed some sort of task on it's own, I think after my computer had crashed thanks to a power blackout, and then it was fine for a long while, booting like it should without forcing me to choose any options or giving me any errors. I'd like to get back to that.

Any ideas?

I think maybe a disk or drive cleaning of some sort would do the trick but I have no idea why this keeps repeating itself.

It sounds to me like you have a floppy drive, and that drive is starting to fail, but isn't completely failed. Which happens.

Your best bet is to just unplug the ****er. I doubt you use it much, and if it's giving you errors anyway, you probably can't use it as well as you'd like, so you may as well just unplug it. Which is about as easy as it sounds. Just take the side of your computer case off, look for the floppy drive (It's slightly larger than two packs of cigarettes, if that helps you find it) and then pull either or both of the cables out of the back of it.

Ta da! No more floppy errors. Or floppy at all. :P

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The other upshot to this is, if for some weird reason you still need a floppy drive in this day and age to get stuff off of old discs, they have cheap *** little drives that conveniently connect via USB and work like a charm, so you're not left in the lurch, no matter what. You can fix your startup issue AND still play Wolfenstein 3D, if you want.

another possibility is you need to choose set up and go into your bios and change the boot priority