fdisk trouble

F

finaddictfred

New Member
First time here and all that. Now..down to business.
Dell E510 2-3 years old
XP sp2
1- master HD drive 0 sata
1-slave HD pata-1 ide
Am trying to format C: drive. Boot the Dell cd from the cd drive and go through the instructions to format and that goes fine. The disk installs some files and then does a reboot. After it boots, it just goes into a boot loop and I have to shut the thing off.
I've tried taking the cd out of the drive, booting the master hd, resetting the factory defaults in the BIOS, and many other things as well. When I reset the defaults I got a floppy drive read error that I had to disable in the BIOS. I also get a drive 1 error when I enable it as well. If this is the wrong area to post this in my apologies. Thanks for any help in getting this resolved
Fred
 
welcome to CF:)

If you're not overly-familiar with BIOS settings, the easiest way would be to remove (or simply just unplug) whatever HDD C: will not be on and try again. Some things are tricky with a SATA and IDE running at once, including some Recovery CD's. I'm not certain if Dell is among them, but that would be my first bet.
 
I unplugged the slave IDE drive and rebooted and got an error reading drive 3 so I disabled it and rebooted and it still just goes into the same boot loop
 
Maybe a bad CD? have you tried Dell's Support line? Do you have a Recovery Partition you can boot to on the HDD?
 
Im guessing but would be wondeering if it was the battery.

Can you get to the dos prompt at all and type date or time and see if its correct?

Maybe tro booting and keep your hand on the pause button to pause the screen and read everything that comes up during the boot process. Your looking for errors or something of that nature. Sorry, thats the only thing i can think of.
 
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