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August 19th, 2016 17:00

Dell Dimension 4300 FDD BIOS update help

I've been working at this for about a week and have reached a stalemate. I picked up a Dell Dimension 4300 not to long ago and I wanted to upgrade the processor from a 1.6Ghz P4 @1.75V to something along the lines of a 2.4Ghz Celeron or 2.0Ghz P4 both @1.5V

This shouldn't be an issue I read many articles on the forum that says the board would support any P4 but all recommended a BIOS update before doing anything. I currently have the original A02 BIOS that shipped with the unit and wanted to update it to A06. After struggling to make a bootable floppy disk in both Linuxon another PC (Using Wine) and Windows XP on this machine, I finally have disks that are able to boot. I put it into the system only for it to come up with "Press f1 to retry boot, press f2 for setup"

I then read many articles about IDE controllers going bad on people's hard disks on this system but nothing about the floppy drives. I know the drive and controller work since XP and Linux Puppy can access it. I tried replacing the IDE cable after reseating the original one multiple times. I even replaced the FDD outright to only get the same results. I'm stuck with this situation, I would prefer not to have to scrap this machine and to get Linux running on it, just with a better CPU. And even then I would like to have an updated BIOS.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what to do next?

Dell Dimension 4300

BIOS version A02

Pentium 4 @ 1.6Ghz

768MB SDRAM

40GB HDD

Geforce4 MX440

4 Operator

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34.2K Posts

August 20th, 2016 04:00

Hi Le9itnova,

One thing to clarify. The FDD cable is different than an IDE cable. Are you sure the FDD is the first boot device in the BIOS?

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