Update its failed and wont boot now.

gk172

Toxteth_OGrady wrote: »

To clear cmos you just need to power down the PC then move the cmos jumper to the clear position for a few minutes. For good measure you could also remove the battery. Replace both in their original positions and then power up. If it works you may have to reset the system time/date. If it doesn't you'll need to start removing hardware to diagnose further.

Your mobo diagram is here:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/vos400/EN/html/parts.htm#wp1184332

#9 is the battery and #12 is the cmos jumper. It will have 3 vertical pins coming out the motherboard and a jumper over 2 of the 3 pins (e.g. pins 1 & 2). To clear cmos you need to pull off the jumper and put it back on a different pair of the 3 pins (e.g pins 2 & 3). After a few minutes replace the jumper on the original pins.

Thank you sooooo much I will have a look later I now have a house full of 5 kids running around :eek: so will have a look when its quieter :beer:

gk172

This morning i had the peace and quiet to open the pc up and moved the jumpers and moved them back and on start up im now getting something new -

diskette drive 0 seek failure
os.checksum error - defaults loaded (could the first be bios as the words were slightly offscreen)


press f1 to continue or f2 to enter setup

any ideas continue or set up or ? Thanks again for your help.:beer:

Toxteth_OGrady

OK, you've successfully cleared the cmos error. Well done. In doing so it sets the cmos back to the original BIOS defaults. That's what the message is telling you.

Press F1. It should boot ok now.

p.s. The 'diskette' error is probably because you don't have a floppy drive but the '1st Boot Device' in the default BIOS settings is probably set to floppy. You can change this by selecting F2 and then changing the boot device order to put you hard disk first.

gk172

Thank you soooo much its now booted into windows :j any ideas as to what caused this? Is there likely to be something failing? Thanks for you time :beer:

Toxteth_OGrady

gk172 wrote: »

any ideas as to what caused this?

Could be lots of things from a power glitch, to a dodgy CMOS battery, to a failing component (memory, disk, mobo, cpu, psu, peripheral).

Just make sure you maintain your backup strategy so that in the event of a hardware failure you don't lose your data.

gk172

Thanks I think I have a faulty usb device as i put everything back together and it failed again but when i removed everything it booted fine so i need to try each one to see what the faulty one is and that could be the guilty culprit?