DELL e3400 w/ AMI bios ver. 0aavep02

Recently had Hard drive go bad in dell. I bought a use one from a friend. He said it was blank but when i put the HD in the dell and boot up, I kept getting ...NTLDR is missing. So i put the HD into another system as slave, and it turns out the HD has 4 partitions. SO i removed them all using Partition magic. Formatted them into one partition. (NTFS 80 GIG) Took it out out it back in the dell. I still have my XP home disc with Product key. So i booted the dell, went into bios and changed config to boot from cdrom. reboot. After memory check, black screen with dell.com at top in blue bar and..it says
"Loading PBR descriptor 1... done." With a flashing cursor underneath. And that is as far as i can go.

So i download XP home SP1 bootable floppy. (6 disk) Went into Bios and boot from floppy. reboot. It will boot from floppy then I get to WIndows setup screen, and it ask me for disk 2. I put it in and after about 25 to 30 seconds, I get the error message. "File \ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded. The error code is 7. Setup cannot continue". So I checked some sites about this message, and I read that i needed to disable ACPI setting in the BIOS, but i do not see ACPI in my version.

So my question is can anyone tell me if it is possible to upgrade the Bios in that system w/o an OS installed in it. Or if that is at all what i need. I tried to go to Dell's site and it ask me for 5-7 digit service number. I cannot find it anywhere. I put in every number on the tower. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks for the help.

 

Going back to booting from CD. From what I see you should only be getting that "Loading PBR descriptor.." if you are booting from the HD. Are you sure you set the BIOS to boot from CD? Did you "hit any key to boot from CD" if necessary when starting the PC? If you have things set this way, change the boot order to CD ONLY and see if you get the same message. (Note: you won't be able to complete the install with things set this way but it would show if you are actually booting from the HD).

 

Thanks for the reply. Well, I know i changed the boot order in Bios. However, It appears that the AMIBios in the Dell system doesn't support Booting from CD. I tried ...a website about bootdisk, and stuff,(many different bootdisk) I tried booting from floppy, but as I explained before, I am getting the Error code 7....BTW, The motherboard is....MX842 w/ an 700MHZ AMD celeron processor.Not sure of the processor. The dell tower says, "designed for microsoft windows 2000" My friend said It did have XP home on it before....

Here is what i done. I took out my HD and put in the HD that i wanted the XPhome installed on. Now I know I could boot from CD on my System. So why not. And first, I got the blue bar across the top with the letter www.dell.com --inside. And "Loading for descriptor 2...done!--- Came across the screen. After chaning to boot from CD. I made it all the way to Windows is loading Setup config or something. And it seemed to stall. That however was a Modded .img of the original disk of XP home. When i retried the process, with the original disk,,,,.... Blue bar..."loading descriptor.... blah blah.
So it appears that the Disk that was given to me, is not a bootable install disk. And I just found out that the hard drive my friend bought me, The other person he bought it from, used it as a HD for a PS2.
So my question now, is even though it was used as a PS2 HD, Can it be formatted and used in a computer?
once again, thanks for the help, and info.
And one more thing the Bios on the Dell, (AMIBIOS ver 01.00.p02 from 1999) doesn't allow me to disable everything except for the CDROM. Seems I need floppy version. Is there anyway I can transfer info from install CD, onto HD floppys?

 

Yes, you should be able to completely format the HD and use it in any computer. You can't install XP with the HD attached to your computer because when you move it over to the e3400 the hardware will be too different and XP won't load on the different machine.

A few thoughts:

I'm looking for a BIOS update for that board that would contain CDROM boot support. Did you find one that you were thinking about using? You can flash BIOS without an OS installed but you have to make sure you have the correct one and that it is worth the trouble. Such as it would give you CDROM support.

***
Without a BIOS update you will have to use the six floppy method. I'm not familiar with that or the error 7. If we clear up the Gateway/Dell issue maybe a further search for a reliable Bios update or read through the manual will give us an idea.

 

I am going to try this now and see how this works. Will I need to change the boot order in the Bios or anything. Other than just to boot from floppy?
Thanks for the help.

 

Thank you!!! Great info and easy. The windows is installing right now.
I am wondering though. What he could possibly want with this system.