Problems Booting an old machine

Hello,
Recently I acquired an old Dell desktop from a friend, with the hopes of using it as an extra machine for experiments, coding, etc. However, I am having trouble booting it up.

Here's the little info I know about the machine: (My friend is NOT great with computers ) Dell model 450/ME, approx. 24-64 MB Ram (saw 2 8MB sticks and 2 sticks I wasn't sure what size) VGA monitor, HD (Size unknown) CD (Speed Unknown) and 3.5" floppy. It ran Windows 95.

Please pardon the wordiness of my explination; I just want to give you as many clues as possible to figuring out what the problem is.
The first thing I did this morning was to open the case and hook up the CD drive and Hard Drive. (They had been removed by another person who copied my friend's data for her.) I then hooked up the monitor and kybd to see what would happen. When I attempted to boot it, I had to reset the clock because the battery is dead. After leaving setup, I recieved an error message reading: "Operating System Not Found."
This was why my friend got rid of the computer--it began doing this to her about 4 months ago. However, she had some trick to make it recognize the hard disk. (She didn't tell me what it was...) so I know the HD is in working order.
Satisfied that at least I had connected everything right, I put the case back on and moved the whole system across the room to where I want to keep it.
Hours later, I came back armed with a Win95 boot disk, hoping to get this thing up and find out more about it before I wiped the HD and put a new OS on it. However, this time when I booted it up, it displayed the basic information, "counted" the memory, then started displaying gibberish. It repeatedly enters 5 or 6 characters in the same pattern, until the screen is full, and then begins scrolling. It will do this until I turn it off. (One time I waited 15 minutes.)
I have tried booting it with the Win95 startup disk, a Win98 installation CD, and empty. It does the gibberish thing every time.
Can you please shed some light on this problem?
Thank you very much for your time.
Britt

 

I agree with Christer...first replace the battery so it will hold the settings when the system is turned off, then reset the settings. After you do that use an emergency boot disk to boot and run fdisk to make sure the partition is active. If it isn't, set it to active. The error you are getting can be the result if no active partition is found. The "old" hd's partition may have been set to inactive to make the data transfer and not changed back. Also check to make sure the hd wasn't set as slave {jumpers} for the data transfer and left that way.

Let us know what happens.

 

Use a 98 boot disk, not a 95. Problem as stated appears to be the need to activate the partition. Your friends old trick was just to auto-detect the drive because the CMOS battery was going, going, gone (I think).