Dell Computer

[Melodi]

I've taken temporary custody of a Dell Dimension 4300 P4. When it starts up it says press F1 for reboot or F2 to enter set up, neither option is viable. BIOS is there and it outlines the floppy, CD drive and Hard drive, but the entries of boot sequence are gone. If you use F12 to go into the boot sequence and choose any one of the drives to boot to, it won't boot to any of them. I tried a bootable floppy and it would not even boot to that. The message when you first start up says Dell did not detect the eide disk drive and blah blah blah. I put in a new CMOS battery and it detected that the cell was low on voltage and it wiped out the date and time, but it still did not boot the system, anyone got any ideas?

[Mobo]

Originally posted by Melodi@May 5 2005, 09:16 PM
I've taken temporary custody of a Dell Dimension 4300 P4. When it starts up it says press F1 for reboot or F2 to enter set up, neither option is viable. BIOS is there and it outlines the floppy, CD drive and Hard drive, but the entries of boot sequence are gone. If you use F12 to go into the boot sequence and choose any one of the drives to boot to, it won't boot to any of them. I tried a bootable floppy and it would not even boot to that. The message when you first start up says Dell did not detect the eide disk drive and blah blah blah. I put in a new CMOS battery and it detected that the cell was low on voltage and it wiped out the date and time, but it still did not boot the system, anyone got any ideas?
<div align="right">Quoted post</div>

Do you have a spare hard drive you could throw in as a replacement for a test to see if it will boot.

[Melodi]

Yep I do, think I should give that a whirl? The HD that's in there we hooked up to another computer and sucked out the information on to a CD so the HD must still be good. Nancy Grace is about to come on, but I'm gonna try to swap out the HD before.

http://www.courttv.com/anchors/nancy_grace.html

[Melodi]

Nope. Nothing, same d*mned error. What would cause this? I've searched Dell's site and the puter is out of warranty. It won't recognize any boot device not even a bootable floppy. Thinking, thinking. It won't boot, could there be bad boot sector? But then why wouldn't it boot from a floppy? Why won't BIOS recognize the boot sequence?

[Mobo]

Try resetting ther bios defaults and / or clear the cmos. Not a bad boot sector cause thats on the hard drive. Its before the boot option which is bios.

olice:

[Melodi]

Okee, you can close this. It's a mobo issue, I took it to school today and had a lot of people working on it and all say the same thing MOBO. Thanks away.

My tower that I've had since '01 got fried, I took that to school too and they say it's fried. It's been bad computer news all around today.

[Mobo]

Ill close and You can get out some of your old money and buy a few more while youre at it.. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/blink.gif[/img]