Fedup28

I did this & it took me to the screen I could get to simply by pressing F2 from the diskette Failure screen & I referred to this screen earlier & said I could make no sense of the intructions therein. Thank you for your attempts to help but please close this thread now as I am getting nowhere.

Thank you for your encouragement. I found a CR2032 in a torch that works fine so I followed the video & put it in. Sadly it made no difference & the PC goes straight to the diskette failure screen with no access to F12

Thank you all for your help. I'll have to take the PC to a dealer to get the CMOS battery done, because I wouldn't know what I'm looking for.

May have solved the mistery regarding my F12 not working. Apparently (according to my grandson) when I switch on, the PC does not display the 'Boot' screen with the F2/F12 option to start with. Rather it goes straight to the Diskette Failure screen, so I get no chance of using the F12 command.

F12 does nothing, even tapping it. Message at bottom of SATA screen reads: Strike F1 to retry boot; F2 for setup utility. I have hit F2 but the instructions on how to change the order as in your previous message are incomprehensible.

Thank you KenB. I pressed F12 & nothing happened. I went to the manual and, using F2 as the screen says, tried to follow the instructions from the manual headed Changing Boot Sequence. This talked about Boot tabs & Boot Device Property which I don't have. What are they anyway? As is normal with computer driven things, I am getting absolutely nowhere. I have decided I can live with pressing F1 every time I want to start this wretched thing, the only alternative seems to be to take it to a shop. Thank you for your help.

I'm lost Thank you for your offers of help. The CMOS battery has come back to life by leaving the PC switched on at the mains whilst closed down & the time/date holds OK. So I proceeded to hit F2 & get the BIOS. What I got in a list was: Floppy A & its details; SATA 0; SATA 1 none; SATA 2 HL DT ST DVD+/- RW GSA-H73N; SATA 3 None; HDD SMART disabled. None of these seemed to bear any relation to your intructions I'm afraid, & despite pressing various +/- keys at the bottom, no order change was achieved. The intructions on the right of the screen were incomprehensible. Thus I am no further forward with the problem, except that the PC seems to take much longer than ever to start up once I have pressed F1 as requested in Diskette Drive Failure screen.

Dell Inspiron 531 Windows Home Premium. I recently had a CMOS battery (?) not working message. By leaving the PC on this has recharged it & the message has gone away. Now I get Diskette Drive 0 failure, press F1 message up. How do I get rid of this? I cannot apply all other answers to this problem I have found on the forum, perhaps they apply to different models. Please note I am a complete novice at this sort of thing. Thanks for your help.