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Go to SolutionOS disk won't boot? (Dell Dimension 3000)
I am trying to install WinXP from a disk onto a Dell Dimension 3000 with an empty hard drive. In the setup utility I have selected to boot from the IDE optical drive, however when I try to boot to the disk I get two short beeps from my motherboard and only two options, Strike F1 to continue, F2 to run setup utility. I have tried two XP disks, one that came with this system and another upgrade disk, bought separately but for some reason it will not boot from either and I am guessing it has something to do with the BIOS but I am not sure what to try from here. The hard drive is empty but already formatted, not sure if that matters. Thanks for any help or advice.
You are getting the beeps and the choice of F1 or F2 because the BIOS is unable to find a bootable disk. Do you have more than one optical drive? If so, you need to try the second drive. The Dimension 3000 uses an IDE/ATA controller and the BIOS will look for boot code only on the master drive unless you go to system setup and turn the master (drive 0) off. In that case it will attempt to boot from the slave drive if one exists.
I would try resetting the CMOS. If that doesn't work you might want to try substituting another optical drive. Most drives these days are combination DVD/CD drives and I've found that sometimes they get confused over what type of disk is in the tray. I kept one straight CD drive in my old Dimension 2400 for this reason.
pheldd
14 Posts
316
1
Posted January 21st, 2011 12:00
Thanks for the reply. Last night after making my post I got it to boot to the disk and have successfully installed XP now. I believe you are correct in that the drives were configured wrong in the BIOS and fixing that was the solution.