Sorry for the incomplete e-mail earlier
I'm trying to recycle an old Dell Optiplex GX-100.  I was able to
successfully reformat the HDD's of two (From Win2000 to Win98SE) and reinstall the basic
drivers to get a Celeron 700 MHz and 600 MHz system working but failed to get
the HDD drive recognized on a 550 MHz system. The drive was recognized by the
other two PC's, but on POST, the error message stated that the drive was not
being recognized due to there not being a primary DOS partition. It also states
that if you used a third-party utility to format the HDD to consult that
program. I used Partition Magic 8.0 to reformat NTFS to FAT32 on the other two
drives, and was able to get Win98 to install to those from a rescue floppy, but
not on this HDD. It wont even boot from the other two good  drives. I've tried
different good memory sticks in one or both of the slots, replaced to 80 pin
cable and tried different plugs from the power source but to no avail. In the
BIOS setup, I set the primary controller to auto, but it won't recognize the
drive(s) and I can't get it to boot from a floppy past the error screen. FDISK
and format c: from the command prompt (with CD support) are denied. I suspect
that there is a setting in the BIOS for recognizing the drive parameters that
is incorrect. If I remove the battery from the board, will it clear the CMOS? I
don't see any jumpers, and I've been up and down the BIOS settings looking
for something out of whack and don't see it. Any help would be appreciated, but
not critical as this will just be a freebie to my daughter to play games on
(instead of mine)! The other two are gifts to other people.

Thanks in advance.
Chris Ryan
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