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Dell Dimension 8400 - Bios "locked down" to prevent new hard drive?

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Pinky

Member
Joined
Apr 21, 2001
Location
Las Vegas, NV
I've been tackling my Dimension 8400 for HOURS now, trying to get any copy of windows XP (home included with the Dell or my copy of Pro) to load. When I try to install to the SATA drive included with the machine I get a hal.dll error. When I try to install home or pro to the new adaptec ata raid 0 array I get "no boot device found" or in this latest attempt a BSOD. What it appears to me is that the motherboard's bios is programmed only to load from the SATA drive - but without being able to get windows to load (hal.dll errors are a long and painful fix) I can't be sure. I am, of course, using the approriate Intel SATA and Adaptec Raid drivers.

My fatal error was re-partitioning the original SATA drive, so the 3.6GB restore image is gone forever. At this stage I'm desktop-machineless, and have been for 10 hours!
 
12 hours and I've given up. Off to newegg (or zipzoomfly) for a new PSU, mobo, heatsink, and case. Screw dell. The agony this has caused and will still consume time from my life is worth throwing money at the problem so long as dell goes away.
 
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