One of my friends purchased himself a Dell Dimension 8400 desktop a couple of months ago(without consulting me) and the Windows install somehow got hosed. Wouldn't even make it to the splash screen, came up with missing the config file. I have it here currently and have run in to significant issues trying to get WinXP to reinstall off of their supplied CD.
P4 3GHZ
1GB RAM
ATi Radeon x300
SB Live!
56K Modem
Integrated NIC
DVD-RW
CD-RW
Problems- First one is the BIOS defaults to SATA which of course Dell had the foresight not to support on their installation CD. If I try to install it using that configuration WinXP's setup informs me I have no HD installed.
Swapping that over to PATA allows me to get to either the repair console or to try and do a repair setup. Going through the repair console I was able to do a chkdsk /r and after waiting an hour and a half it reported that it fixed errors(can't access the log file, no idea how many or what they were). I try to run a repair setup and I get to 33 minutes remaining and get a BSOD from BAD_CALL error. I have tried everything I can think of to get around this. Dell does have a doc on their site that talks about the problem with the SATA option not working and provides a download to install their SATA drivers via floppy(you aren't given any other option- no using CDs/DVDs or local files) but they didn't include a floppy on this machine anyway :|
My friends better half is in finals week right now and has some papers on the HD of this machine- wiping it is not a viable option. I don't have the proper PSU connectors to power the HD so I can pull the files over to my HD and do a Dell reset recovery- anything possible I can do to avoid this is highly desired.
Any help/suggestions anyone can offer is greatly appreciated.
P4 3GHZ
1GB RAM
ATi Radeon x300
SB Live!
56K Modem
Integrated NIC
DVD-RW
CD-RW
Problems- First one is the BIOS defaults to SATA which of course Dell had the foresight not to support on their installation CD. If I try to install it using that configuration WinXP's setup informs me I have no HD installed.
Swapping that over to PATA allows me to get to either the repair console or to try and do a repair setup. Going through the repair console I was able to do a chkdsk /r and after waiting an hour and a half it reported that it fixed errors(can't access the log file, no idea how many or what they were). I try to run a repair setup and I get to 33 minutes remaining and get a BSOD from BAD_CALL error. I have tried everything I can think of to get around this. Dell does have a doc on their site that talks about the problem with the SATA option not working and provides a download to install their SATA drivers via floppy(you aren't given any other option- no using CDs/DVDs or local files) but they didn't include a floppy on this machine anyway :|
My friends better half is in finals week right now and has some papers on the HD of this machine- wiping it is not a viable option. I don't have the proper PSU connectors to power the HD so I can pull the files over to my HD and do a Dell reset recovery- anything possible I can do to avoid this is highly desired.
Any help/suggestions anyone can offer is greatly appreciated.
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