problem with Dell Pentium II

[mohair]

I have an old Dell Pentium II/XPS 400 unit with 384 mg ram and a 16 gig
hard drive. After several years of being disgusted with Windows ME, I
upgraded to Win 2000 Pro using a FAT 32 partition. The BIOS is the most
up to date for the unit - Phoenix Bios 4.0, Release 6.0, version A13.

The system is a constant loop when setting up the programs and files.
It reboots itself and goes back to searching for components, etc.

Dell customer support (outsourced to India, of course) says that the
motherboard and bios can't handle Windows 2000, yet I know people who have
loaded it on similar machines. He also said the motherboard won't
recognize any drive larger than a 16 gig drive.

Tell me if my plan is correct - I will load another drive with a Win 98 OP
system and hope it will read the current drive so I can copy my data files.
Should I remove the Windows 2000 op system?

 

[Rick Lewis]

I'll bet if you put a clean hard drive in that dell and
load 2K from scratch it will work just fine. Then you can
install the original hd and copy your data. The problem
could be because you upgraded your Me system. OS upgrades
never go well. Maybe one of the reasons MS stopped selling
upgrade versions.


Rick Lewis [MCP]

 

[Moe Hair]

I'll bet if you put a clean hard drive in that dell and
load 2K from scratch it will work just fine. Then you can
install the original hd and copy your data. The problem
could be because you upgraded your Me system. OS upgrades
never go well. Maybe one of the reasons MS stopped selling
upgrade versions.

Thanks for the advice. I finally got Win 2000 working after making my CD rom
the boot drive and forcing Windows 2000 to do another install. This stopped
the loop it was in. However, now when I boot, I get a screen asking me which
install I want to load (there are two choices - yet I only see one operating
system load on the hard drive).

I'm going to install another hard drive on this old computer, load the op
system on it, and use the old drive for data (backed up of course).

At the same time, I'm going to start building my own computer piece by piece.
I can't take the small cases, and the hard to find specs for old Dells.
Since they moved their customer support to India, all you get is rote
responses and they're usually incomplete.

 

[Steve N.]

The hidden file boot.ini on the root of the boot partition has two OS
entries in it now. If both choices work then open the file in Notepad
and remove one of the OS entries. Make a backup copy of the file first.
You could just leave it alone or change the timeout value to 0. It
doesn't hurt anything being the way it is.

As far as Dell support goes, you'll have much better luck doing it
online than over the phone. Email has no accent

One call I made to Dell a few weeks ago I got a guy in Panama! That was
a hoot!

Steve