C:> Not Found

[jim mccartney]

Dell dimention 2400, AO5 bios,Maxtor 6Y080L0 80mb hard drive, 1Gb RAM, WinXP home OS. PROBLEM doesn't recognize C:> drive.

I received the computer from my cousin, when I first booted up, it booted to the user passwords screen. From there on I have made one mistake after another. I thought I could get around the passwords by removing the motherboard jumper,or by removing the battery,and then just reconfigure the bios. I tried ,with no luck.I then tried to change or eliminate the password using UBCD No luck, so I tried "Systemsinternalsuite" No luck but my real troubles began. Now when I boot up I get the message "F1 To rebootor F2 to get into setup." In setup it shows that I have a 80Mb hard drive as 'primary master' I then use a 'Bart disk' to try to boot,no luck . Bart tells me that there is no C:> drive the only drives I have are A:>floppy, B:>ram,& X:>cdrom,BART. I try to use the partition utility and am told there is no C:> drive. I try to use 'Fdisk' and get the same info also if I try to format I get the same story. Somewhere in my bumbling I was told that my hard drive was RAW, another message, says STOP 0x0000008e. Another message said something about 'setuprr'. I realize that being a newbe I shouldn't do the things I do, I would like to be able to use the drive with the installed OS on it. I am not interested in the installed programs . Is there a way to get the drive to the winXP system?

thanx

James M McCartney

[email protected]

[shanenin]

I would try pulling the power cord, then pressing the power button(this will drain all the power from the board). Then pull the cmos battery for about 30 seconds. Place the battery back in. Then replug it and start the computer. The computer will do a scan for ide drives. That may help.

[martymas]

wiil it boot in safe mode

or can your bios recognise the hdd

which has your operating sys installed

marty

[Pete_C]

What did you do with UBCD?

After you clear the CMOS, you must enter setup (press F2) where at a minimum you need to choose to load optimal defaults, change the hard drive to auto defined and click auto detect drives and then choose save settings and exit.

Normally with a Dell you press Ctrl+F11 to boot to the hidden restore and recovery partition to return the hard drive to factory settings.

But if you wiped the drive with UBCD than you will need to buy a copy of windows and install it.