What am I doing wrong?

[TDUBacis]

Hi, i'm new here, and i recently gt sick of my old hp pc and took out my burner, another cd drive, 4 sticks of ram (ot sure what size, gotta check and see when i load it up) a sound car, and video card (32, weak, i know), as well as my main 20 gig hardrive from my old comp. and a second 10 gig hardive that was working successfully on the other comp. (except the other cd drive, my other comp was too small to fit it) so i put them all into an empty dell, dont know how fast it is or anything, i have to check it when it loads up..but that is the problem, it isn't. I took the A drive out to pt in the other hardrive btw. When i turn it on, the screen comes up TOSHIBA and keyboard detected blah blah like its supposed to. But then from there it hops over to another black screen that says

Floppy Drive A: Failure
CMOS Time & Date Not Set

Press <F1> for Setup, <ESC> to Boot, <F2> for Option Rom Screen

Thats it. so i'm like ooook, naturally i press escape to boot then, right? so i hit escape and thenit just goes to another blak scren that says:

OS Load in progress...

the it has a flashing curser a few lines below it and i can't type anything, it just stays like that. So after a while of restarting and going n circles, i decided to take out my backup hardrive and put back in my A drive. The only difference that made was that the first screen i described took off the floppy drive A: failure, but everything stayed the same. If i press F1 for setup, a black screen comes up that says: Enter Password (1):
when i get it wrong then the number changes to two then three then it says: Invalid password - System Halted!

Pressing F2 only brings me to another black screen that says

Scanning for Option ROMs

Press <F2> For Error Messages

and then that brings me back to the first screen that i described. So what am i doing wrong? Any advice? :sad: :rolleyes: :sad: :sad:

[TDUBacis]

I'm starting to think that it has something to do with my main hardrive, because it was heavily aflicted by viruses that i took too long to fix. but i just got it virus scanned and spyware removed by a friend on his pc that same day and he gave it the ok and he always gets everything cleaned out, he uses that aol virus thing, and for spyware he uses mcrosoft anti spyware. Do you think that it is the hardrive or could it be something else? Any feedback would be appreciated, Thanks.

[TDUBacis]

Well, here i am again, i figured out how to set the time and i had to take out my slave hardrive and put in my floppy drive and now the comp just goes straight from the Toshiba, mouse detected, keyboard detected, blah blah screen, to the OS load in progress...

What do i do now? I'm going to try to put my slave drive as my master drive and put windows xp professional on it, its already on my original master, and load it up, then when it loads and and is working, im going to try to switch it back to the other hardrive. ANY feedback would be appreciated, THANKS.

[kc0arf]

Hi,

Just a couple of guesses here:

* It is possible that your computer is too old to recognize the hard drives as installed. You did not mention on your questions if the BIOS reported detecting the IDE drives. Load up your BIOS first, and see if it sees the drives. If it does not see the drives, they will not get the chance to start booting.

* It is also possible that the Dell cannot use the drives even if detecting them. They are larger (greater than 2 GB), and in the old days, especially if there are no PCI slots on the computer, it is possible that the BIOS cannot deal with the larger hard drive size

* You mentioned having either 2000 or XP. If the OS was getting to a point of loading, but windows had a problem, you would see NTLDR Missing or some similar message. You didn't mention that, so I doubt windows is even getting the signal to load

* The hard drive might be physically dead. You should feel it humming in your hand. If you hear loud clicking noises, or tapping like a hammer tapping a nailhead, that hints problems.

And if you do get Windows to load, since the hardware has radically changed, it is going to go through and re-detect a whole bundle of hardware, and you risk really getting into some trouble. I would go find your friend and get the data off of that hard drive, and then START OVER with a FORMAT!

Christian

[TDUBacis]

thanks a bunch for the feedback. Yea, the motherboard i'm using now, i am not sure how old it is, but it isn't ancient, i think it said like '95 or something. but i am taking into consideration what you said about it not being able to support drives that big, which are really small now to me, a 20 and a 10 gig. so now what i decided o do before i read your post was to make the 10 gig my master and the 20 gig my slave, and put xp professional on it, like i have on my 20 gig, i switched them because i didn't want to have to clear out my drive, and i had a bunch of crap on the 10. In any case, i couldn't find my xp professional dick, so i am using my xp home edition on it, and when its done i will keep you up to date on what happens...thanks.

[Retro Kyd]

what up TDUB, how's everything going w/the computer now? Any progress?

[TDUBacis]

great, now my disk keeps getting stuck at the part where it says searching for previous versions of windows, or at least i think its frozen, its says like that forever. If its not one thing its another. i'm willing to whipe out the whole drive i dont care i just want my computer to work already.

[Mollybob]

Floppy Drive A: Failure
CMOS Time & Date Not Set

Enter Password (1):
Enter Password (2):
Enter Password (3):
Invalid password - System Halted!

That message (or those messages) can be caused when a CMOS password has been set in the CMOS setup program or BIOS setup
program. They can be caused when you set a password in the BIOS or when the motherboard battery fails or when the system has sat idle without electric power for a while or when a prankster has set a CMOS password. Booting from a known good floppy does not work, and neither does the option of using the escape key with a known good floppy.

Looks like you need the motherboard battery charged or replaced.
I had this problem on an AST brand computer and was able to work around it a few days later by cold booting the computer, leaving the computer on for several minutes with the message displayed for Press <F1> for setup before trying Escape.
When I did try Escape key after several minutes, it booted into Windows! I suspect the CMOS had a related timer for the password. If this doesn't work, have a technician reset the CMOS jumper on the motherboard or remove the CMOS battery and replace it with a new one. Once that is done, you should be able to press F1 to enter setup.