Trying to fit a new HDD to my daughters PC. It's an oldish Dell. Put the new drive in, went into the BIOS and set it to auto detect new primary slave drive. In doing this I think I accidentally reset the Diskette Drive option (it doesn't have one of course) and now it will not even let me into the BIOS, just keeps coming up with 'Diskette Drive 0 seek failure'.

Doesn't matter what I press I can't get it back to the BIOS.

So, what do I do?

Just unplug the power and take the battery out of the machine.... leave it for 15 mins and put it back in again... will clear the bios back to factory defaults......


but usually you have to press F1 to continue.. after that it will go in to the bios

The BIOS has a backup battery, so as well as the above you need to disconnect it for a minute or two, its usually a yellow disk battery with two wires into a minature plug.

Thanks chaps - I'll have a go at that in the morning.

There should also be a set of pins marked "CMOS" if you switch the jumper to the other side of the three for about 30 seconds and then put it back (important!) that should clear whatever the cmos actually is and force the machine to redetect all the drives