Dimension 4100 won't boot, overnight error "invalid boot diskette"

Try replacing the CMOS battery and reseating the drive cables. After you do that, make sure the drives are recognized. If they aren't, chances are your hard drive has expired.

and . . check the floppy drive for a disc in it . .

wrs

when I enter set up, I'm able to determine that the system clock isn't losing time. Doesn't that suggest the presence of a good battery? Then I set the boot sequence to CD ROM. Re start with the Resource CD to see if I can use the diagnostics. As it is trying to boot is gives me the message that there is no FAT partition. That I would expect because when I formatted the drive for XP I went with the recommended NTFS format type. Going a little farther, I changed to "C:" directory, ran DIR and found that there were only 14 files showing, (about 450,000 bytes used) and no directories (16,000,000 bytes free). It seems that the drive is usable but has been wiped clean. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what I'm seeing. Actually I'm not understanding it at all. Comments please!

Not to contradict ejn63, but i seriously doubt a CMOS battery has anything to do with your problem. "invalid boot diskette" usually indicates a non-bootable floppy disk is in the floppy drive. The diags will run regardless of whether you have a FAT or NTFS partition so i'm a bit confused why your getting the FAT message. I'm pretty sure that the C: you changed to is just a temp drive created by the boot cd and doesn't reflect what is on your actual HDD. What files are listed when you run DIR?

A marginal battery can cause corruption in CMOS and produce that error.

What pattern of lights (ABCD green/amber) is showing on the back diagnostic panel?

snapohead-

Thanks for doublechecking the obvious but definitely no diskette in the A Drive. If the Diags will run regardless of the system I'm confused re the mssg too. I thought that the diag content was individualized to the system. I will re run the effort and note the actual progression. Next, its possible that the C: I'm getting is a temp drive but thats a little beyond my expertise. The files appearing seem to be DOS type files. ATTRIB, CHKDSK, SCANDISK ETC. Any clue there?

Amber, Green, Amber, Green

If anyone sees this, I've moved on to a new phase. Downloaded the Dell Diagnostic series (5 disc). Can't boot with disc one. Booted from the resource CD it says windows has determined that there is no valid FAT partition. All the while I hear a pretty loud ticking like a spring driven clock. The screen shows disk information and then goes to-

"Extracting C:\ CHKDSK.EXE", etc, etc. 14 extracted files show just like this one. Then it leaves me at the A:\> prompt. with nothing in the A Drive. Here I would be totally baffled but I'm assuming that the computer is automatically reassigning new drive letters. DIR of A Drive shows 27 files now. With A drive occupied I tried B drive and much to my surprise it accepted the prompt. This is where I began to load the Diagnostics discs. 1-5 loaded properly and I ran the quick test first. Results showed that the system hardware was optimized? So, I ran the Extended Test with the same result. Very surprised that the diagnostics program gave me nothing that I could understand, I esc out and ran the SCANDISK program from the A prompt. it indicated that it saw a problem in sector 2 where the command .com files reside. I ask to fix it and after making the undo disk it said it could not repair the sector that other damage to the A drive prevented it. Other script here suggests that ther is or will be the possibility of extensive damage, I'm guessing to the hard drive, (C:\)

Are there any further test proceedures that will allow me to see if there is anything salvageable on the disk and exactly where the damage is located, (what components need to be replaced?)

I know that this one is really getting long, but I could really use some help

It sounds like your HDD is faulty, although the Dell diags is pretty good when it comes to diagnosing a faulty HDD. To check whether you can recover any data, you may have to put it in another system as a secondary HDD. After you've backed up your data doing this, you could try reloading windows on your suspect HDD, although i'd be suspicious of its reliability.

There is also a BIOS-integrated hard drive diagnostic. Reboot your computer. At the Dell blue logo screen, press the Ctrl + Alt + D keys at the same time. The computer beeps once to acknowledge that the hard drive diagnostics have been initiated and the following message appears:

IDE Diagnostics running, please wait
Primary
Drive 0: (Drive Model) -

The test may take up to three minutes to run the diagnostics (the time is dependent upon size and speed of drive). When the diagnostics are complete, one of the following messages appears:

IDE Diagnostics running, please wait
Primary
Drive 0: (Drive Model) - Pass
Drive 1: No IDE Device
-OR-
Secondary
Drive 0: (CD-ROM Model) - Diagnostics not supported
Drive 1: No IDE Device
Test complete, Press to reboot

Press the key and restart the computer.