8200 BIOS/POST issues

Hoping for some advice and help here, thanks in advance.

 

I have a 8200 that has not been used for over a year (I built myself another PC) that I am resurrecting. I had pulled the original 60gb HDD (a year ago) to use as an external and have now replaced it with a 160gb Western Digital that has photos and music on it from my other PC, there is no OS on it whatsoever.

 

Problem #1

My plan was to simply hook up the new drive, pop in my restore CD and start anew with reformatting the new drive (I have already transferred the files to a 320gb SATA drive in my main rig) and a fresh install. The first issue I ran into was that the BIOS recognized the HDD, floppy and CD burner(original), but the burner had "(not installed)" listed behind it in the boot order and would not boot to the XP Recovery disc because of this.

Any suggestions on how I can get this drive 'installed' so I can boot from it and reformat the HDD and install XP?

 

Problem#2 - (which will have to be solved first I imagine)

After getting upset with Problem #1 and thinking I knew what I was doing, I attempted to clear the BIOS by swapping the jumper pin block (from #1 to #2) on what I thougt was the configuration jumper. Turns out it was the PSWD(password jumper), which shouldn't be a problem becase I never took it off default which I've read in the system documentation is set to NO PASSWORD. Now here is the meat of this dilemma, I replaced the jumper pins to their original settings, restarted and am receiving POST beeps (11 I beleive) and the status lights on the back are like this: A-amber, B-amber, C-green, D-green. (Amber/orange to me, but I guess Dell calls that yellow). From the Diagnostic Code chart this indicates the memory failed to be sized or enabled. I upgraded this PC with 512 RAM (2x256) about 2 years ago and believe that I removed the continuity sticks at that time and it ran fine. The reason I think so is because I have two green sticks with no memory on them in a spare parts box (I hope and believe I still have them). I'll try diggin them out and sticking them in the 2 open slots.

My real question here is why would the BIOS load fine and get to attempting to boot from either the CD drive or HDD initially and after I reset the PSWD now give me a memory configuration error? Does that question make sense?

 

 

So to wrap all this long windedness up, I need to solve Problem #2, then comes #1. Any suggestions/answers to these issues will be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks