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Yet another Dimension won't boot from disc. Help!
Ok, so I have done all I can to try to solve this myself, so any help would be appreciated. Let me start by saying, yes I have dug through as many of the other posts as I could on this issue, and none of the solutions worked.
I will start with how I came to the problem. It is a dimension 4600 running XP home with two disc drives, one is a cd-rw (slave), the other is a dvd (master). I got a blue screen that shows up when I try to start the computer (every time) saying "Unmountable boot volume". With a little searching, I found that this might be able to be fixed by using the XP disc to replace the boot.ini file.
I have two discs, an XP Pro CD and an XP media center DVD. Unfortunately I dont have an XP home, but understand that either should be able to repair the problem. So I put the pro disc in the dvd drive and start the computer and the "press any key to boot from disc" prompt never comes up, the pc boots from the HD and goes to the windows mode selection screen (normal, safe, etc..) since every time it is turned off, it is either mid boot, or at the blue screen.
I changed the BIOS to boot from the cd-device first (I assume that means whichever drive is hooked up as the master) and still no boot from disc prompt.
In the interest of time I will try to just list what I have tried since: Either discs in either drives with both drives active. Unplugged the cd (slave) and tried both discs in the dvd. Plugged the cd in as the master, with the dvd unplugged. (with all the previous combos, I didnt alter the drives settings in the BIOS, because when I entered the setup, it had recognized what was present). I disabled booting from the HD in the previous scenarios as well, and then I get the F1 to retry F2 to enter setup screen after the boot fails.
I have pulled the battery off the mother board and drained all the power. I have tried to boot from CD from the F12 menu.
Both discs are good, I have tried them on another computer. Both drives are good, I was using them daily prior to the blue screen.
So that's everything I can think of, basically I have tried every combination of drives and discs. I am not a computer guy, so try to use layman's terms if you don't mind.
Thanks for any help, obviously this is a fairly common issue with Dells.
fireberd
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June 24th, 2009 04:00
CD/DVD drives, as shipped from the factory are set to "Cable Select", not Master or Slave. Have you tried setting them to cable select?
fireberd
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June 24th, 2009 08:00
Looking at the BIOS, there is an option for "OS Install Mode" and default is Off. The manual doesn't say what this does or what happens if it's set to "ON" but that is something to try.
colville6
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June 24th, 2009 08:00
Thanks for the reply. I may have mispoke. The drives are exactly as from factory. I assume they are set on cable select. When I was using the term master and slave, I was referring to how they were set in the BIOS. I have not moved the jumpers at all, just moved the cable from one drive to another.
colville6
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June 24th, 2009 11:00
I saw that, but never tried it. I did try changing the fast boot setting, but that made no difference.
Upon changing the "OS Install Mode" to on, I got the following message during startup.
"The amount of system memory has changed.
Alert! OS Install Mode enabled. Amount of available memory limited to 256 MB.
Strike F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility."
I didn't proceed beyond that, because it made me a bit nervous, I dont want to risk losing the data on the HD.
hrova
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June 24th, 2009 18:00
This may be a stupid question, but have you tried both drives? I have a 2400 (from the same era as the 4600) that will boot to one drive, but not the other.
fireberd
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June 24th, 2009 18:00
That OS mode obviously is not the problem. The 256MB is referring to memory that is available for the installation - it has nothing to do with your hard drive.
I do not usually suggest a BIOS update but if you can't boot from a CD it has to be something in the BIOS. The only problem with trying to update the BIOS is that you need to boot from a floppy diskette (if you have one). HERE is the latest BIOS update and there are instructions on how to install it.
colville6
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June 25th, 2009 16:00
Thanks for the help. I went to check the BIOS version (wich was A03 btw, way outdated), and decided to try unplugging the DVD and making the CD the master, one more time because I had seen that recomended in another thread. I also unplugged everything from the back except the video, power and keyboard, even though I had tried it before, this time it worked. I cant explain why, but it worked. I also went and tried to boot with only the DVD hooked up and it would not.
Unfortunately I fixed the boot.ini, and just when it looked like I was going to be up and running, I got a different blue screen; it is looking like the HD, or at least the boot sector is bad.