hey looking for some help ref this one please. I have an old dell xps tnt450 and it has win 98 on it. I wanted to format the whole machine and install win2K on it. Only thing is I cannot not boot from CD ROM I tried to access the BIOS (have done this many times on other pc's no problem) but this machine does not want to let me access the BIOS I press F2 no joy, just boots from the hard drive. Just to make sure I tried all the F keys, no joy (apart from F8 to get the safe mode menu) So what I did was format the drive from another machine install win2k and popped the drive back into the machine...now it says NTLDR is missing. The thing is I can boot from a floppy (as this must be enabled in the BIOS) but thats really no good either. My question is how the hell do I access the BIOS? On start up it says Nvidia TNT2 model 64 BIOS v2.05.13.03 Can anyone help me? Tod :-

Did you tried to press DEL? axel

How do I get into CMOS? The Nvidia information relates to your video card - not much use I'm not insensitive, I just don't care.

Thanks a million for the "Del" tip I can now access the BIOS, set first boot option to floppy, 2nd to CD ROM, 3rd Network boot and 4th Hardrive....problem is it still is not booting from the CD ROM ??? any other ideas? Tod :-

Whenever I have these sorts of problems, I get right down to the very basics, and fast. Make sure your CD is bootable. The only way to do that is either get the machine you are working on to boot to that CD, or boot the CD in another machine. Sometimes this proves nothing, IF IF the CD is a "burned" copy, or scratched, because some (older) cdroms are fussy as to burned CD's, and some are more fussy as to scratches than others. Is the CDROM jumpered correctly? Is it on the second master? Is there any other hardware on the cable the CDROM is hooked to? If you can't get it to work, pull out the hard drive, any and all hardware on the IDE's except the CDROM, on MASTER (re re re check the jumpers) I've even had mystery problems that SEEMED to be caused by modem/sound/network hardware conflicts that would affect CDROM operation.

turns out d prob was i formatted d drive usung ntfs and d nltdr file was shagged decided to reformat using fat32 with my old dell mschine now that i van boot from cd thanks a mill though (del button did d job! Tod :-

i too can't access bios. i have a gateway select. i've tried all the f keys, plus, escape and delete and i either get (invalid system disk- replace the disk and then press any key. or if i boot and hit F1, i get i guess what's called the bios screen? but it freezes. i just installed a new hard drive with same results. i just want to reinstall the OEM winME and have everything back to normal so that i can upgrade to winXP thanks