f1 key bios boot dell 8200

larkin · 29th July 2008

Hi, a client has a Dell Dimension 8200 tower dating from 2002. 1.8 MHz CPU, 533 MHz bus, 1G RAM. I had to swap out a bad HD for a new one. While enroute to that, w/old drive still in PC & I'm still seeing if I can recover data, on BIOS boot, the screen dialog stops at "can't find primary drive" "hit F1 to continue" [choice 1" , or [choice 2:] "hit F12 to enter setup". So now on boot, client has to still hit F1 to continue successful boot to wXPhome-sp2. This doesn't make sense to me, it never happened before his old drive went bad. Is there a way to continue the BIOS boot without this message? The drive is obviously found & booted to. Is this a battery problem? Is this a sign of an upcoming mobo failure? CMOS or boot instruction problem?
Should fdisk/mbr fix this (this seems not so to me, because boot hasn't reached windows yet, the drive is supposedly not yet found)? Would flashing the BIOS to lastest available, fix this (don't know if there is a more recent BIOS)? Bad cable?

Thank you.

**BurrWalnut** · 29th July 2008

Could it be that during the HDD change, you omitted to reconnect (or dislodged) the FDD cable and the FDD is ahead of the HDD in the BIOS boot sequence?

**TonyT** · 31st July 2008

1. remove old drive.
2. set jumper on new drive to master on channel 1, boot directly to bios & verify bios sees drive.
3. boot to windows.
4. shutdown, set jumper on new drive to master w/ slave, connect old drive and set jumper as slave.
5. boot directly to bios & verify bios detect both drives & that boot order is correct.
6. boot to windows.

note: some drives have only 3 jumper settings, master, slave, cable select, while others have master (single), master w/ slave, slave & cable select.

If using sata drives, boot with only the new drive. Then shutdown and add the old one. Likely not using sata though as that system does not have onboard sata ports.