one of my 4 PC's is giving me trouble, I took it down last week so i could get a new desk for it, it is a dell dimension 2100 (horrible PC), so i put a wireless card into it, and set it up and it would not boot, so I called Dell, they informed me it was probably the hard drive, so I put a hard drive in from my 98' IBM and it worked.

My hubby suggested I put the XP in the IBM so I did, and it told me there was an error so i inserted the disc and it worked fine.

I cannot get the Dell to boot of the CD nothing, so I phone Dell back and they told me it was my motherboard (one of the IDE slots), but all the devices are reading in the BIOS so how can it be, if it was the IDE slot would it not show not installed.

I also downloaded the HD repair from seagate and it would not read that either, so I did switch CDRW's and still nothing.

I have tried everythign I can think of and got no where, any help would be greatfully appreciated, as this is my husbands gaming PC and he woudl really like it back.

i forgot to mention that when there is no CD in I get a Invalid boot disk warning after the dell screen, and if the CD is in it goes to the blue death screen, and tells me this:

A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer

Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newley installed hard drives or controllers. Check your hrad drive is properly configed and terminated.
Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart.

Technicla Info

*** STOP: 0x0000007b (0xFC938640, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

Thanks

HI Ribs,

Welcome to PCHF,

When you have the CD in the drive upon boot do you get an option to "PRESS ANY KEY TO BOOT FROM CD"? if not then maybe check out your CMOS and check to see if your CDROM is set as the first device in the boot order (it might be boot priority of even 3 options named first,second,third boot device etc).

To enter CMOS there are usually directions before the compter runs it's self testing routine on system power on (POST or Power-On Self-Test). It will normally say something to the effect of PRESS [Whatever key or key combo] TO ENTER SETUP.

Once you can boot from the CD you might be able to repair the boot sector or the master boot record from the recovery console, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

One thing to keep in mind, if you install Windows XP on a hard drive while it's in one computer and then move the drive to another computer....unless both machines are IDENTICAL in pretty well every fashion (motherboard and CPU especially). You will have to re-install windows.

Thanks Ron.

I did change the boot sequence to only accept CDROM, and thats where I am stumped.

I am aware about the different systems, I just dont get why it will boot from CD from one and not the other, grrr.

oh and I also just remembered that when I put the HDD in the 98 without the CD it gives me a screen with a whole bunch of numbers and it says no operating system found and arrows pointing to F1, but with teh CD in it installs XP.

Ok, have you tried the drive settings in the Dell to make sure there were no master/slave conflicts?

I cant log on so how do I do that from the BIOS I am drawing a blank, all this Tech Stuff has bogged my brain.