Paul - I have had a ton of nightmares with the Compaq DeskPro series of PC's.  We have quite a few at work and regardless of the model type they all have their little quirks.

Whenever I run into problems like this with these machines the first thing I usually do is reset the BIOS on the board.  Most of the machines I work with have protection passwords on them and there was no consistency with the use of the passwords so I just do this as a default to avoid any problems <especially with hard drives or other failed hardware>.  They have the button as opposed to the jumpers so it is usually quick and easy.

They will always halt on the time issue but the key is after using the F1 boot command you have to hit F10 again quickly to go back in.

Hopefully this helps.... I have had so many mysterious and bizarre happenings with these PC's that I can really feel your frustration.  BTW, I have had a ton of hard drives "fail" on these machines only to work fine on some of our other PC's <Dells, etc.> and even on different DeskPro models.  Go figure.

Bill

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