Problem with Dell Dimension E310

Hi all,

Working on a Dell Dimension E310 desktop. It was given to me because it was 'running slow'. I figured a reformat would fix it, done deal.

Or so I thought.

Upon boot I could not locate the utility partition. I tried F12 as advertised in the post but that 'utility partition' takes you to a program that runs 'diagnostics' on the hardware but didn't seem to offer any possibility of a reformat or return to factory.

I booted into safemode and went to the desktop and popped in the cd. I need to point out that it would, at that point, read the cd. The windows xp program would pop up and then offer to run the install ect;. At which point it would freeze the program. I thought maybe it was the cd, so I tried several. I could leave it for more than 10 minutes with no progress, so I chalked it up to hard drive issues. God knows there was enough popups at start up.

I attempted to get it to boot from the cd after the post, no prompt "strike any key to boot from cd' had ever popped up before. So I opened setup, checked to see if bios was reading the drive, it is definitely reading it and it was already at the top of the boot order. Restarted...no dice. The one time I did manage to get it to say 'strike any key to boot from cd' by hitting cntrl + F11 but this may have been a fluke, it froze anyway.

I attempted to boot to the cd by hitting F12 at the post to go to the Boot Device Menus. You're presented with the option to boot to the individual onboard devices, system setup ect. I opted for Onboard or USB CD-ROM drive. After about 5 minutes it returns with 'Selected boot device not available - strik F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup util'. And will do that in succession.

I chalked it up to hard drive woes, popped it into an external HD case, plugged it to my comp, reformatted it as a blank Fat32 drive, popped it back into the dell and figured that would remedy everything.

Boy was I wrong. So far it will post, run the blue dell screen, and then white flashing line infinitely looking for the HD. I re-tried all methods to get the disc drive to read as described above with no success.

I went to the BIOS and set the boot sequence to be only the Onboard CD Rom drive and disabled all the others. No dice. Same as above. I see that the little green light on the front does flash and indicate that it's reading, but no luck as to getting this thing started.

I am at my wits end. Does anyone have any ideas?

 

Update:

Hitting f12 upon boot takes to the boot device menu. Selecting 'Hard Drive Diagnostics' returns the following diagnostic

Drive 0: No Device
Drive 1: WDC WD1602ABKS - Pass
Drive 2: HL-DT-ST DVD+/-RW - Diagnostics not supported
Drive 3: No Device

Drive 1 is the HD, so it's reading it properly, Drive 2 is the dvd drive so again it's reading it.

If I put the cd in the drive, reboot, hit 12 to return to the boot device menu, select 'onboard or usb cd rom drive' it hangs for a second and then prompts me to hit f1 to continute, hit f1, It then returns

Selected boot device not available
strike f1 to rety boot, f2 for setup utility

So it's not able to boot the cd in the cd drive for whatever reason.

I created a usb boot of the windows Xp disc using Wintoflash, pop the bootable usb drive in, return to boot device menu, select usb device to boot from it prompts

Strike F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility
<stuck f1><the letter 'j' appears on the screen for some odd reason>
Nothing happens. it does not return with the usual f1 to continue prompt.

so yeah.

 

I have tried all combinations of placing the dvd drive, usb drive or hard drive at the top in the boot order and also tried disabling all devices except dvd drive, usb drive or hard drive individually and no matter what the same black screen occurs that posts the phoenix rom bios info, the dell computer series and

Drive 1 not found: Serial ATA, SATA-2
Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility

No matter what, no matter the boot order or device enabled/disabled.

Someone help please.

 

Does that Dell have a floppy drive? If so, I would try to make a set of setup floppy disks, boot from the floppy disks, then run the install from there. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310994.