"invalid boot diskette"

khankhan New
edited March 2004 in Hardware
I was walking my brother through an installation of a CDRW over the phone, got it plugged in and turned on, and it comes up with "invalid boot diskette". Its a dell, so it conveniently goes black screen->message of doom. I then told him to open the case, and set the jumper to slave (its the secondary drive on IDE2, after his primary CDROM drive). So he did, boots up, same message. Tried talking him through getting to BIOS (reboot and tap f1,2,8,12/esc/del) but none of those worked. Sometimes, if he's lucky, he gets "invalid boot diskette" repeatedly, scrolling infinitely. He had to go to bed for the night, but any ideas?

Comments

  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited March 2004
    He didn't stick that goofy floppy disk with the DOS drivers that comes with most cdrom drives in there, did he? I've seen any number of people put in the "convenient" driver disk for a cdrom install and have things go wacko.

    Have him remove all CD's and floppies. Also, many Dell bios' are hard to get into. I've had some where I would just pound away on the keyboard at random in order to get a "stuck key" error so I could bring up the "enter bios" screen. What model Dell is it?
  • khankhan New
    edited March 2004
    It is a Dimension, I believe XPS 800 (celeron 800 mhz proc). No disks or anything in the drives. And I totally hear you with being a bi-atch to get into the bios. I tried on the phone for like 30 minutes. Power! now f12! nothing? power! now f2! anything? and so on...
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited March 2004
    Or, um, did the CMOS BATTERY give up the ghost??? BIOS will redefault on every cold boot this way, and some older Dell's like a boot floppy and some will not default right if battery dies as they are trying to do the clearing part of CMOS table.

    Also, check cables for IDE and floppy, ok??? A DEAD or incompatible IDE device can hang a box of that age also.... So can TWO things jumpered SLAVE on same cable.

    John D.
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited March 2004
    Installing an IDE drive shouldn't make a difference as far as diskette errors go. Have him double-check his floppy cable. He might have bumped it loose while installing the cdrom. Maybe he had to remove it altogether to route the other cables and got it backwards when he replaced it.

    Ask him if the light on the floppy drive stays on constantly.
  • OlivasOlivas Phoenix
    edited March 2004
    You should also have him check and make sure he didn't knock loose the IDE cable for the hard drive itself.
  • khankhan New
    edited March 2004
    Rechecking the IDE cables fixed it. *Phew!*
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