Dell Dimension xps t550 hardrive problem

[loohye]

i was given a dell xps t550 computer which had windows 2000 pro. the person who gave it to me put an administrator password on it, but forgot it. i tried to install windows xp pro on it and it wouldn't let me. i tried everything...so i took the hardrive out of the dell and installed the it into another computer. i ran HDclear program and cleaned the drive... everything was fine...i installed xp pro onto it worked great. then i took the hardrive out of the other computer and re-installed into the dell and i got an error message that basically said that i either had a virus or my hardrive was corrupted or there was a IDE contoller problem. it said to try and use A:\chkdsk /F....nothing worked.....and thats where i am right now...stuck. any ideas?

 

[amdskip]

Reinstall xp with the drive in the dell machine. You can not swap a hard drive with xp installed on it to another computer without having problems.

 

[loohye]

i could do that, but when i went into the bios, it doesn't give you the option of booting from the CD like(cdrom, c, a). On my other computer which has the Phoenix bios you can boot from cdrom, a. c, etc. do you know how to get the bios to boot from the cd-rom? someone told me that you can by-pass the Dell bios from an F button, ie F3, F6 and go right to a much more user friendly bios that responds much like the Phoenix......if i could set the bios so i could boot from the CD i would be fine. any suggestions?

 

[amdskip]

Usually hitting F8 will allow you to choose your boot device.