Please help with my Intel system!!

Thanks in advance,

This is my first post on the intel section of overclockers forums. I am trying to build an extremely basic system for my girlfriends family. Now my problems lies with formating and reinstalling windows. The System in question is a Dell Dimension XPS T600r. It has a 600Mhz PIII slot 1 processor and an mobo based on a intel chipset. Now the Harddrive is new so I am trying to format the drive. Everything is detected in the Bios but, I place an 98 Windows startup disk in the A drive it reads (i/o error). Now the floppy is working, and the floppy cable is in ok. Can you tell me a shortkey to get a command prompt up like a:/. On my system it is F8 to bring up the command prompt.....

Thanks for your help.!!!


Dont worry I've built PCs before......

Sounds like a bum boot disk to me. My Win2K boot disks do that to me every few months since I use them so much.

Might need to replace it.

Far as I know, if you don't have anything to boot to right now you won't be able to get to any prompt at all.

ok I'll try a different boot disk.....

Thanks....

Yes I agree. Boot disks are very unreliable. I had a Me startup disk that worked fine until I needed it again a few months later. It didn't want to work anymore and I had to make another one. I believe that you shouldn't trust 3 & 1/2 flopies at all, as they always have bad sectors on them. ( Had bad experiences with them before ).

Good luck getting the system up and running!!!

Why not just boot from the Win98 CD? Floppy disks and drives are not reliable and should be avoided if at all possible.

get into the bios and change the first boot drive to cdrom and boot up from the windows cd rom. hell of a lot better then floppy

DaveB said:

Why not just boot from the Win98 CD? Floppy disks and drives are not reliable and should be avoided if at all possible.

Click to expand...

Agreed. It will format you HD for you too. Its the only way to install win2k Otherwise you got what 4 floppies