Boot failure: system halted

All connections good.

HD spins but pretty noisy.

PC won't boot to a Maxtor diagnostic floppy or an XP quick boot floppy that I downloaded from the net nor to an XP start up floppy that I burnt from Dell's web site.

Tried new floppy drive too, still won't boot from anything on the floppy drive.

I can get to the BIOS, everything looked good, reset it to the defaults. No help.

Tried new battery, no help.

Tried a Dell recovery CD, it will boot to that, but I stopped it since it was the incorrect CD for that machine. Haven't let it go far enough to anylize the HD.

Thanks for any help,

Phil