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BIOS

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by oceancandle

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When I boot up it takes about 4 or 5 minutes, it goes from the Dell screen to a black screen asking me to press the F1 key to continue, from there it goes to a black screen giving me a choice or it will make one for me in so many seconds. How do I straighten this problem out so my computer will go from the Dell bootup screen to the XP login screen?

2 replies

by jaqui

why is it giving you the bios boot error that throughs up the screen where you have to hit f1 to continue?
what piece of hardware is causing the problem?
( it will say on that screen )

once that's figured out, you may get rid of the widoze boot option menu.

by jbaker

If the machine is a recent Dell, you may have a dead or dying optical disk drive (CD/DVD). Try replacing the drive and see if you still get the error. I have had a couple of Dell machines that will not boot without the "F1" key press, and that is what it was, this message comes up even if 1) boot from CD-ROM is disabled, and 2)CD-ROM is not first drive it searches for in boot up (actually those are backwards...2 should be 1, and one should be two)

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