Nightmare with Dell SX270s

S

Stressed

New Member
Our charity was recently donated some Dell computers, mostly SX270s and SX280s. I'm trying to install a new operating system on these systems, but I'm facing brickwalls, mainly with the 270s

They came with Windows 2000 installed, however, we weren't given any of the logon details, so we can't boot to desktop to set up an external CD drive to install XP or Linux Mint (The BIOS doesn't support USB CDROM drives).

The BIOS does support flash drives. However, we only have a USB-CF drive with 1GB cards that it'll accept, and even then the 270s are failing to read the device intermittently, crashing the Windows 98 installation I'm trying - it's the only OS I can use that'll install from DOS

There is a way of booting from LAN with these machines, however, the Dell support site is awful so I've no idea how to start

Is there a way to get a clean OS on these machines without having to pay for the proprietrary SX CD drives, or 2.5HD adaptors etc?

Thanks
 
If you have working computers you could try putting the hard drives in (set them to slave) and wiping all the data. Then put them back in the original computer, stick the windows install cd in and it should work.
 
Unfortunately I can't, not without buying a 2.5inch to 3.5inch IDE adaptor to wipe the drives on a decent PC, or without buying the proprietary CDROM drives for the machines. Thanks though
 
Perhaps you could try ringing dell and see if they have still stock rescue cd's for these machines.
 
Stressed said:
Unfortunately I can't, not without buying a 2.5inch to 3.5inch IDE adaptor to wipe the drives on a decent PC
Click to expand...

Are you saying they take a different IDE ribbon cable? Because you don't need to physically install the drives in your decent computer to format them.

I've plugged them in and left them hanging (carefully) to do maintenance.
 
These machines are 2.5inch IDE types, and none of our others support them - even the laptop we have has a 3.5inch connection, so we have nothing to format them with unfortunately.

Ironically, we do have a rescue CD, just no CD Drive to use it in - USB CDROMs aren't supported in the BIOS, and the bay is for proprietary Dell hardware like this:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/DELL-SX260-/-...ItemQQimsxq20090928?IMSfp=TL090928156004r4098

I can get these machines fixed up by buying one of these CDROMS or an IDE adaptor, but we don't want to be using up charity money for things like this we're only going to need to use once, but I'm starting to think we may have to

Cheers anyway guys
 
I think I've sorted it. Found a Linux Mint installer that'll make this 8GB USB key bootable and is installing now
 
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