'strike F1 to retry boot or strike F2 to setup utlility' PROBLEM !!

S

Stoneislander

Geek Trainee
I need some help. I have a Dell Dimension 4300 machine and fired it up and got a blank screen with 'strike F1 to retry boot or strike F2 to setup utlility'. I clicked on F1 and the same message appeared below, and F2 took me to somewhere which basically done nothing rleevant to enable me to get into Windows.

I'm running Win XP and spoke to Dell who talked me through a couple of things, of which didn't work. They then said it was a Motherboard issue. So they stung me £284 for a new board and an engineer call out. It worked for about an hour and then went back to the strike F1 screen again.

Has anyone got any ideas whats causing this ? Is it the Hard Drive ?

I need to get it up long enough to back up the data which amounts to about 6GB. I need a quick solution to get data off.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Stoneislander
 
Stoneislander said:
They then said it was a Motherboard issue. So they stung me £284 for a new board and an engineer call out.
Click to expand...

Every time I hear what people charge to do half an hours maintenance I feel as though ive been ripped off myself!

If I had this problem myself it would be a matter of whipping the harddrive out and sticking it in a second PC. You might loose whatever warranty there is left though if you do this. If there isnt a sticker creating a seal on the the case (ie when the sticker is ripped they usually leave a big VOID marking!) it might be worth trying. Its a simple procedure.

This F1 and F2 thing must be something to do with dell, ive never seen anything like that.
Its hard to say what the problem might be, did anything dodgy happen when you were last in windows? It could be a hardware problem or it could be the windows installation. The best to have a crack at sorting will be the windows installation.

Try repairing the mbr, just in case.
If you have a windows xp cd boot from that then press R to get into the repair screen. Then type fixmbr.

If you dont have the xp cd rom you can download a floppy bootable version of the startup disk.
Bootdisk.Com - Free NTFS Bootdisk, Boot Disk, Windows Bootdisk, XP Bootdisk, DOS Bootdisk
 
Hello,

I started it up and got it all connected to broadband etc, wnet to make a brew, cam eback and noticed a few desktop icons were missing and it was disconnected. So I shut it down and restarted it and thats when the F1 and F2 came up.

With the new motherboard installed it fired up ok, slow, but ok, but all i want is for it to be stable long enough to do a back up of Outlook express and my own personal documents.

I will try the reinstall the XP CD and try and fix it. Is there anything else I can try ?

Cheers
 
Sorry, I must have read your first post a bit too quickly! The mbr will be fine.

Ill have a think and come back later! After having the Dell guy round there are certain things that can be assumed to be ok. The fact that it worked for while after your new motherboard had been installed is weird. It kinda says its not the hdd or the motherboard. I doubt it was the motherboard in the first place tbh and because of that I might be inclined to get on the blower to Dell to come and fix the problem properly this time. The most expensive desktop motherboards are close to half the price you have folked out already, you dont want to go spending more money!
 
Thank you very much for your help. I must admit I thought it was weird too, but heh I trust guys like Dell...stupidly !! Is there any way I can back up files without going into windows ?

I tried reinstalling Win XP CD over the top trying to find out if the OS was the problem or the HDD or something else. The dell guy took my HDD away and put it in a cradle and plugged a USB into his own PC at home trying to read the data, but it came up saying Access Denied. He even tried putting it internally into another PC, and it wouldn't recognise it as it said it wanted the original XP CD. Weird...

Anyway if you have any other thoughts then please, please, please let me know.. all I want is to get this info off and then bin the HDD if that is the problem...
 
I believe PC world do a data recovery service, but it'll cost you. Alternatively buy a new hard drive and connect both the old and new one by IDE/SATA and find data recovery programs like Recover My Files. These also cost money to activate, but if your data is more important to you than money, it'd be worthwhile. These programs salvage files from up to 4 formats ago (I found a .jpg file from 3 years ago on mine) but don't find all the data (just half or so), so that's one thing you'd be risking.

over 200 for a motherboard?? Zeus is right, even I feel bad about that...

Just a suggestion though...

Mike
 
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