[vicks]

Good evening all>

A couple of days ago we had a power outage and when the power came back on and I tried to boot the computer, it would power on but would not boot.
I have the OS disks to reinstall and have used them in the past.

My computer is an older Dell OptiPlex GX150
Intel PentiumIII processor
a Maxtor 6L020L1 hard drive (C drive)
a WDC WD800JB-00JJCO (2nd hard drive)
512 MB ram
running XP pro.

It will power up fine, but when I tried to reinstall the OS it got to a window after loading XP where it said "please wait" after an hour of that I turned the computer off.
Now when I try to start it up, it comes up with needing to press F2 to enter setup. It now says there are no boot devices.
When I scroll down to boot order it shows the hard drive, floppy drive and next to the CD drive option is says not installed.
I tried using a floppy boot disk and it isn't recognized........
Any suggestions what I can do to try to get this to work?
Thanks in advance for what ever you can help me with.
Vicks

[Mumbodog]

Try this, open the case with the power cord removed, remove the cmos battery, wait 15 minutes, reinsert it, power up and enter the bios and set the time, is the hard drive identified ?

If the hard drive does not show up in the bios, then it is possible it has died.

If the cmos battery is over 5 years old, replace it with a new one before continuing with diagnosis.


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[vicks]

Thanks Mumbodog.
That made the cd drive show up again. I am trying to reinstall the OS. now.
VIcks

[vicks]

Again, Thanks Mumbodog!!
It worked great, and I was able to install the OS. Have been updatine SP2 and others stuff.
vicks

[Mumbodog]

Thats great news, you are welcome.

To save you time on the next reinstall (hope you dont have to) you can slipstream service packs into your Xp cd using this software, this saves a ton of time reinstalling.

http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html

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[vicks]

Mumbodog,
Thanks for the tip and link.
Happy Computing...
Vicks