optiplex gx150 won't boot...sort of

Go into the BIOS and check what is listed next to the Primary Drive 0 & 1, Secondary Drive 0 & 1.  Looking at my GX150, it says:

Primary Drive 0..............................................Hard Drive

Primary Drive 1..............................................OFF

Secondary Drive 0.........................................CD-ROM Reader

Secondary Drive 1.........................................OFF

I work for a school district that recieved some GX150s as a donation from a University.

We managed to use all but about 4 of them, which were beat up in shipping. I.e. had face plates that looked like someone took a hammer to them.

Point is I have 4 left-over motherboards and when I used one, I ended up with the exact same problem you have, but it took only 3 minutes to get it working.


What I did:

Step 1: The system hung on boot because the University I am speaking of had 1 CD ROM, 1 ZIP Drive, and 1 Hare Drive. I moved it from a Tower to a Small Desktop Computer; hence, I used the Small Desktop Computer heatsink and I removed the tower extender from the side of the motherboard that looks like an expansion card.

Step 2: I put it all together and it hung on boot. I got into setup and it asked for a Password.

Step 3: Powered off Computer and disconnected the IDE cables from the motherboard. This will stop it from hanging. I also removed the PASSWD Jumper from near the motherboard power connector.

Step 4: Boot the system and wait for it to say Password Disabled and power it off. Replace Jumper covering PASSWD

Step 5: Boot into setup and set Date/Time and make sure you have Primary Master set to On or Auto, and Secondary Master set for ON/Auto, but make sure the others are off!!!

Step 6: Save and Power down. Then connect the IDE cables. The drives are configured as Cable Select and placed at the end of the IDE cable. The HDD was attached to Primary IDE, and Optical Drive was attached to secondary.

Step 7: Boot and press F2 at setup and reset NVRAM and Factory settings. Caps lock, numlock, and scroll lock on. Alt E, Alt F, and Alt B. This will reset NVRAM and fix anything wierd the University did. The computer will reboot and detect IDE stuff.

Step 8: Boot to CD or Floppy with the Asset Utility and make sure the Service Tag, Asset Tag, and Owner Tag are as you wish. Asset /? for instructions.

Step 9: Install A11 Bios from DOS mode. Reboot and go into Setup. Configure Setup for your boot order, preferences such as PXE... boot menus, passwords, wake up settings...

Step 10: Exit and Save Settings and watch Widnows boot.


The above is what I did. I am a fully trained Dell Tech, but not on these forums. Essentially, the person before me was right on the money why it wouldn't boot. You probably have an unknown drive. If you just turn it off, it will boot. To remove the password, remove the jumper boot and wait till it says password disabled. With password disabled, shut off, replace jumper, and boot into setup again with access.

Hi,

I am not really sure what you are saying.

However, I can tell you that you do not need to go A06, A07, A08...

All you have to do is pick the Bios you want to use and install it.

I.E. Let's say you want to upgrade to A11.



If this is the case, create your floppy or CD, or whatever and just upgrade directly to it.

There is no reason to continuously read a floppy, erase the eeprom, program the eeprom, verify the eeprom, reboot, erase the eeprom... You are just making it more riskey than it has to be if you do it that way.

You have a about 6 times higher chance of having something go wrong if you flash your bios 6 times. All be it, there is very little risk with the GX150, and there is even recovery procedures for this specific computer.

Justin

Thanks for all the replies!

Actually, I have overcome the booting issue and now have another problem.  The rebuilt system doesn't recognize the internal ethernet port.  Does anyone know how to recover the configuration of the port?  Is there a setup disk that can be downloaded from somewhere?  Any ideas, please advise.  TIA.

BTW, I have a similar issue with the internal display adapter.  It got reconfigured as a Standard VGA adapter and won't allow more than 16 colors and 640x800 resolution.  TIA, again.

YOu need to go to http://support.dell.com and find the drivers. Just select the type, model number, and Drivers and Downloads.

From there, get the Ethernet Driver for the proper OS.

Thanks. I will take a look see.

Well,

I have tried several times to resurrect the internal network card w/ no success.  I have tried disabling the network controller in the bios.  That didn't cause Win98 to try and install the driver.  Have tried adding new hardware w/o success. I trashed all the network settings and tried to start over.  No matter what I do I can't get Win98 to recognize that this box already has a network card in it. Short of re-installing Windows that is, which is what I was trying to avoid.  If anyone has any other ideas, I'd appreciate it.  Thanks.

 

Hi,

I have seen GX150 computers with Windows 98, 2000, and XP.

Windows 98 ran really poorly on the GX150 computers in particular at least in our environment at work.

However, all the above had working network at some point on a GX150 at work.

GX150 towers with a hackjob or PCPOWER and Cooling power supply work fine with
better cards. AKA a Geforce 6600 or 6800GT or 7800GS work fine with an appropriate power supply. The GX150 in particular seems to have a very weak power supply.
GX150 even works with Radeon 9800 Pro when it has a good power supply.