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Post RAID No Boot Loop
I have an older Dimension 8400 that came with two 149g HD's in a RAID. One HD failed and I got a 500g replacement (no more 149s to be found) but I can't include in the RAID. I have tried all manner of ways to get to the RAID Setup to change to a regular boot off the 500g on which I will load XP, but when I turn on the system I get a beep and am faced with a message that says it failed to boot and to hit F1 to retry or F2 for BIOS setup. BIOS is not help and nothing gets me to undo the RAID, and CTRL+I won't work, or any other combination of keystrokes. I have tried putting in an XP disk to boot from, but I get a message that says PBR failure. I'm stuck in this vicious loop. Anyone know how I can make this work?
RoHe
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July 17th, 2009 17:00
Did you change the BIOS setting for SATA Operation to RAID Autodetect/ATA ?
Is the new drive connected to SATA0 on the motherboard?
Did you disconnect the remaining RAID drive (and all peripherals, except mouse, monitor, keyboard)?
Put the XP CD in the drive, reboot and press F12. Select Boot from CD off the list. That should launch Windows Setup so you can format the new drive and install XP.
The correct order for reinstalling XP on the 8400 is:
XP
Dell Desktop Software (System Utilities)
Chipset driver
Video driver
Audio driver
Network driver
Modem driver
etc.
Good idea to download DSS and the latest driver for each component from Dell and burn them all on a CD so you're all ready to do the installation.
And don't forget to install XP SP3 and all the other Microsoft updates as soon as possible...
Ron