mtwarren3

Again everyone....thanks so much!! I'm glad I stumbled onto this sight and at least now i know where to go for future issues!! I think I'll leave the BIOS alone for now....don't really want to tempt the fates quite yet :)

There is no floppy on this pc....I did some poking around (in the dell forum) and found some similar issues. I've changed the battery, checked to make sure everything was seated properly, etc. After reboot, yet again, it now goes back to floppy diskette error, I went back in and changed the setup and disabled the floppy.....saved and now windows startsup. The boot sequence does the hard drive then cdrom...i think. From what i got out of the other forum, apparently this diskette failure is some type of "flaw" with the Dell pcs. Other than that info that forum proves useless for a newbie like me. You "guys" have gotten me on a better track, and i've learned alot! Needless to say I greatly appreciate it. There are no reputable pc places nearby to take this thing to and dell wants an arm and a leg just to talk to you. Anyway, now that I have windows up and running is there anything I should do or any other helpful hints? (aside from a hammer??:D)

Okay, so I'm back to square one again. Everything seemed to be working fine yesterday until I removed some of the useless programs that were on my pc. After a reboot, I'm back to that booting error....[ithr] from my first post. Probably should have left well enough alone????

i made sure the floppy was disabled.....and it looks like whatever it is you had me doing has helped!!! It started right up into windows and everything seems to be working fine....matter of fact it seems to be working faster than before! THANKS SO MUCH FOR ALL YOUR TIME AND EFFORT!!!!!!!!!

no floppy here, have the cdrom and a dvd burner on here....i'm in the setup now....under the Drives portion it says all floppy drives a disabled... all USB floppy drives are enabled integrated floppy drive is enabled and the integrated floppy drive is enabled and anly allows reads Or...am i in the completely wrong spot for that?

Okay...followed you to the letter.......saved and exited, two beeps and now screen says Floppy diskette seek failure strike f1 to continue, f2 to run setup utility....

Okay...disconnected all that wasnt on motherboard, got two beeps when i rebooted (not sure if that's important) now it says: Floppy diskette seek failure Drive 3 not found: Parallel ATA, PATA-1 (PRI IDE Slave) Strike the f1 key to continue, f2 to run setup utility

ok got that done and rebooted, now ive got that first alert about the checkpoint but it proceeds to say invalid configuration information- pleas run SETUP program floppy diskette seek failure keyboard failure then it says performing auto IDE configuration.... Drive 0: disk drive Drive 3: CD- Rom defice please run Setup program strike f1 to continue, f2 to run the setup utility this make any sense to you?

Okay, this is where your patience will be put to the test....how do i disconnect the hard drive???? Did I mention I REALLY APPRECIATE YOUR HELP???

Got the same thing with F12

Tried that and it "beeps" but other than that I'm stuck on that same screen.

The new battery is in, saved the settings in BIOS and exited that, now I'm back to that "initial" screen. The one difference is that "line" (status bar?) is now 3/4 complete. Do I just leave it as is and wait and see what happens or am I just out of luck??? (can't get to the DOS prompt to check disk)

So, bought some new batteries....anything I need to know before i try and hook it all back up? By the way, I REALLY appreciate all the help...untill today I had no idea that there was a battery!

So, I popped out the battery and now it's stuck on that initial screen says Dell DV051 Series a line BIOS Revision A03 in the upper right corner it offers the F2=Setup and F12 Boot Menu and it's stuck on that screen. Should i just buy a new battery or am I just missing something?

I'll try that out and see if it works.....wish me luck!!!