Please help! Strike F1 message continues....

Question

Background: Our Dell Dimension 2400 was overloaded and crashed on the Dell-furnished replacement 80 GB Seagate Barracuda hard drive. I replaced the HD with a Western Digital 160 GB Caviar 7200. The Dell posts, and the Bios set-up configuration recognized the new hard drive which passes the diagnostics.

To load the OS, Dell kindly immediately sent me a set of replacment CDs for my misplaced ones. I changed the boot sequence in the BIOS Set-up to boot from the CD-Rom first.The reinstallation OS CD will not boot up, and only the Strike F1 or F2 for the setup message appears. F1 does not respond. The keyboard has not received an error and is working on the Dell.

Only one error message appeared regarding the diskette, so I changed the BIOS Set-up to "Not installed" for the floppy drive.

The indicator lights are all green untill the F1/F2 message, then fourth glows amber! Light number four is regarding the cables needing to be reset, so I replaced each IDE cable, and reset each cable and RAM cards also...

The beeps are a short blast of 2 distinct beeps as the F1/F2 message appears.

The diagnostics on F12 have passed each of the current drives. Every component of the configuration in Set-up is recognized.... To isolate the problem cable or component, I detached each and checked for error messages, and then replaced each, and then confirmed that each was recognized in the Bios set up.

So this had been quite the tech oddessey.

Following leads from the forums, I changed the CMOS battery ($1.98 investment), bought an additional RAM memory card (512) incase the original 256 RAM was bad.... but it works and is recognized also!

I'm in the process of clearing the NVRAM right now... by changeing the jumpers on the mother board as DELL instructed on a link...the the sequence of alt+ keys...

ANY OTHER POSSIBILITIES????

A million thanks in advance for assistance!

Meta

shesagordie · Answer

MetaRCK9

Meta.

Not certain if the following will help:

Have you disconnected all the peripherals from the system except the keyboard, mouse and monitor?

How to configure a Dell Dimension series system to boot to the CD or DVD drive.

If you have two optical drives installed, make certain that you use the 'Master' drive.

Is the new 160gb hard drive, the only hard drive installed.

Bev.

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Please don't send me questions about your system by DCF Messenger.
Post the issue in the appropriate Board, where they will be answered.

MetaRCK9 · Answer

Sorry to Bev...I forgot...yes, only one hard drive is installed. PS great cat picture

MetaRCK9 · Answer

Thanks for the lightning quick response!

I only have the monitor-keyboard-mouse basic plugged in as you suggested. Thanks for the link on booting from the CD...I thought that was a big help, because one doesn't have to reset the the BIOS set-up boot sequence, and just an F12 step will do!

I followed the cables for the secondary master drive, and that drive worked before the crash...mmmm maybe I'll try changeing drives for the master and slave between the DVD and CD drives...Right now it is all worth a try!

Sadly the crashed harddrive happened 2 days after the 4 year extended warranty ezpired, but I've sure gotten to learn a lot of techie know-how!

Meta

MetaRCK9 · Answer

Eureka! Clearing the NVRAM by the insturctions on this Dell link by taking out the CSMOS battery and the Alt+E, then ALT +F steps, then ALT + B reconfigured all to the default original pristine DELL system. ( The link instructions also guide one to set the USB to "no boot").

This link from Dell http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=dim_bios&thread.id=55387

provided the answer on clearing the NVRAM

Thanks to the clue from Bev, I only attached one CD/Rom as a master in case the CD or DVD were compromised by the crash(?).

I reattached the peripherals, powered up and got the diskette error message , so I jumped into the BIOS set-up (F2) and reconfigured the configuration on the Diskette to "Not installed" (since our new Dell had not come with a floppy drive) I reset the time and saved the settings, exit and off it soared into "Windows set-up!

Thanks to every forum contributor who provided clues and techniques that I could try!

Storage, Drives & Media

Please help! Strike F1 message continues....

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