90s Dell Dimension not loading

[TheGermanEngie]

sup retro fellas

 

got this dell dimension xps t550 from a friend's garage. pentium 3, 512mb ram, and enough 5.25 drive bays and floppys to feed the poor. so i am greeted with a dell screen. the only keys that work to get past this are ESC and DEL. it then lists all the specs of the machine, and asks me to enter setup. it never gets past this screen.

 

i really want to experience this era of computing, but i dont know what the roadblock is. help is much appreciated

[Master Disaster]

First off it will almost certainly require a new battery.

 

I'd say your issue is it doesn't have a hard drive, or if it does it's unplugged/dead.

 

Open it up and look for a hard drive, if one is connected then unplug it.

[ProjectBox153]

Does the machine have an operating system? You may need to reinstall it along with replace the hard drive.

[emosun]

Pro tip: People here aren't on the up and up with old computers , post this to vogons. Literally the whole site is dedicated to older machines.

 

As far as your problem , unplug the hard drive from the board. If the hard drive is dead or not responding it can lock up the bios from doing anything at all (little known fact about ide drives). basically unplug all the drives untill the machine reaches a resting point and says it has no boot devices , then reconnect the drives until you have something to boot from. 

[TheGermanEngie]

8 minutes ago, emosun said:

Pro tip: People here aren't on the up and up with old computers , post this to vogons. Literally the whole site is dedicated to older machines.

 

As far as your problem , unplug the hard drive from the board. If the hard drive is dead or not responding it can lock up the bios from doing anything at all (little known fact about ide drives). basically unplug all the drives untill the machine reaches a resting point and says it has no boot devices , then reconnect the drives until you have something to boot from. 

the hard drive works. the HDD light is working, and i can hear the heads moving

[TheGermanEngie]

13 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

First off it will almost certainly require a new battery.

 

I'd say your issue is it doesn't have a hard drive, or if it does it's unplugged/dead.

 

Open it up and look for a hard drive, if one is connected then unplug it.

the hdd works, though i do have a spare IDE drive that is proven to load windows xp. ill give that a shot

[TheGermanEngie]

update: i swapped in a new battery. it now says "system configuration data updated"

 

ERROR

0271: Check date and time settings

 

what to do? cant access BIOS, and its still stuck on "Entering SETUP"

[emosun]

15 minutes ago, TheGermanEngie said:

though i do have a spare IDE drive that is proven to load windows xp. ill give that a shot

windows xp need the motherboard drivers to be installed in order to load you can't just drop the xp drive in and expect it to work

 

3 minutes ago, TheGermanEngie said:

what to do? cant access BIOS, and its still stuck on "Entering SETUP"

already said , unplug the machines drives and only connect drives like the floppy and cd drives.

if any of the drives arent working or are not connected in the right order or that master and slave jumpers aren't set correctly the bios will lock up. so start with no drives connected at all