it won't boot to any of the devices, that's why i figured i'd try to boot to the bootable floppy and reflash the bios, but can't get it to even boot to the diskette
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Dell Dimension 2100, can't boot, think its bios related.
Tried booting to XP bootable diskette but just hangs saying "MS DOS Starting....." Any way to recover bios?
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Answers
only thing the computer will do if you try to boot to one of the other devices (cd , hd) is
hang at the dell logo screen (www.dell.com). if you try to boot to the diskette, at least it will read it, then try to start MS Dos, then it just hangs.
since it is booting from the floppy, i highly doubt it is a bios problem.
Here my troubleshooting procedure :
with a new motherboard : verify if all mounting standoffs correspond with the holes in the mobo !!
Or test the mobo ouside the case, on a wooden (non conductive) surface
clean the system from dust, then test with the minimum setup - disconnect also all peripherals and network cables :
connect only motherboard + cpu + 1 ram stick, video card, power supply
verify that the 4-pin cpu Aux power plug is connected
on boot, do you have a display?
if NO it is one of the connected, swap ram, Power supply, video card or monitor - leaving only motherboard and cpu
if Yes, add devices till the problem shows
you can also check the motherboard for bad capacitors as shown here : www.badcaps.net
additional tests and things to try :
boot without ram, it should beep; (also, without video card)
try bios default settings,(if possible) or clear the bios by removing AC and bios battery
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by: rbarnhardtPosted on 2009-06-22 at 10:41:28ID: 24684711
Did you try booting from the CD? I have seen this problem before, and it is usually either a bad floppy disk, or a bad FD drive.