Motherboard or Power Supply?

So you are stuck in DOS?

Try removing cards, graphics and network and restarting.

Check the CMOS and BIOS to ensure they are configured correctly or simply reset to defaults.

To get more help, please provide more info, as to what you see or where you get to, also what OS you are running, RAM, age (of the computer of course) etc.

OM

This is what happens, i can see the dell logo in the bios start up, then it gives me errors, primary disk not found
secondary disk not found
FLoppy not found
then it says press f1 or f2
ON the Bios under primary it says unknown as well as secondary

From your description, I don't think that either the motherboard or power supply is bad.

When the system boots, do you see the light on the floppy drive flash on and then off?

Do you here the hard drive spin up, and see the hard drive light flicker?

If yes, the drives have power and are "working", at least electrically.

If not, I suspect that a wire broke on the drive power cable and has disabled all drives.

While a new power supply would correct the problem. You may only need to switch drive power to a different cable.

If the drive lights do flash, the BIOS is telling you that it was not able to find a formatted drive to boot from.

Try booting with a startup disk (or boot disk) in the floppy drive.

If you can boot from a boot floppy, the "worst case" problem is a virus wiped your hard drive.

If you have critical files that you need to recover from your hard drive, STOP and see if you can contact a local repair shop to help figure out if / what virus you may have.

Chas

This is not the power supply.
You would not get as far as the message.
Most likely causes.
Bad CMOS battery. (On motherboard)
Virus.

Since this sounds like a business setting, you probably have a UPS, so a lightning strike is not a good possibility.

If not the battery or a virus, restore your data to a different PC from the backup, and find a technician.
If no backup is available, ouch, a lesson is learned.
Regards, Chris

Since both the floppy and the harddrive are not good.
Your answer is this:
1. check cable connections
2. replace cables.

If this still does not work your drive controller on your motherboard is gone. Replace motherboard answer solved.

If CMOS battery was bad the computer would refind them.

If there was a virus then the floppy would work and not the hard drive.

Power supply is not the problem you have named three devices. You need at least three connect the chances of them not working and your motherboard connector working is slim.

try the cmos battery
then the memory
can you hit ctrl+alt+D on that model for a hard drive diagnostics?

You either have a virus or one of the Floppy/HD/CDR are overloading the buss. Have HD and CDR/W that have the same problem, go for 3.5 floppy only boot if it works add HD. If it works will probably be CD / CDR/W is problem if not try booting off CD minus HD. If it works you have bad HD controller card. Repair to on-boad controller card (HD/CD/CDR/CDRW) is expensive, much cheaper to replace as long as no critical data resides on it !

Actually none of this answers helped me. Here is what the problem was, i had to "reset the bios."
Once i did that everything worked. The good people at dell helped me. The guy that works for dell thanks as well for your help it did lead me to that.

This question was closed by the author