Press Delete key to Resume

Question

I recently installed all the suggested patches for Microsoft Office 2000 Professional from the Microsoft website and also did a scandisk and a defrag on drive C:. Since this work, my Dimension 4100 with ME O/S boots to a black screen that identifies my hardware configuration and displays the message "Press Delete to Resume" at the bottom of this black screen. When I press Delete, everything proceeds as normal, but I don't see the black screens I formally saw at boot-up; i.e., those that identified the RAM, drives, graphics card, sound card, etc..

Have I set something inadvertently that causes this phenomenom? Is there a way to return to the old boot-up procedure, or, better yet, not see any black screens at all? Is there a way to bypass this "Press Delete to Resume" page and just proceed to the ME splash page?

Thanks in advance for your help.

fergie_chick · Answer

Having the same problem, could anyone help?

volcano11 · Answer

The question was answered hundreds of times last year when this was originailly posted. - we probably just got tired of answering it over and over and over again. There seems to be several causes of the problem, but one has to start by looking at the back of the computer for the 4 diagnostic lights while the "press Delete to continue" message is on the screen. These may give a clue to where to start looking for the problem. To interpret the diagostic lights see the following document:

http://docs.us.dell.com/docs/systems/dzuul/codemess.htm

Report back what you find.

Steve

waltonb · Answer

For what it is worth, I had the same message.  I turns out is was a bad CDROM drive.  I unplugged that and it boots ok.  Turns out CR drive was not recognizing disks.  So I would suggest unpluggin all drives except for hard drive and taking all the PCI cards out and seeing if message gos away.  Then plug them back in one at a time.

Windows General

Press Delete key to Resume

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