Dell Optiplex Gx280 not booting

[samtfaulkner]

I bought a Dell optiplex GX280 Small Desktop With no hard drive.
It has Pentium 4 HT 2.8GHZ

But I have just one question which you may be able to help me with.
I have bought a new hard drive for this machine and plugged it in. the bios recognises the HDD.

My problem is that i cant install an OS from Cd or usb. I have tried a lot of disks and different OS systems including Win xp, win 7 and Ubuntu.

The system comes up with 2 errors. "Selected boot device not available - strike F1..", "invalid system Disk _ Replace the disk then press any key"

Ive tried changing the boot order and disabled floppy drive (because i dont have one) in bios
would love to get this compy working. Any help or advice would be much apprieciated.

Kind Regards
Sam

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

try hitting f10 or f11 just before the boot screen and choose the cd rom as the boot drive while the disc is in there!

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

read here!

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/document?c=us&l=en&s=gen&docid=4F6B48DB99ACDA78E040AE0AB7E15F49&journalid=801623DA06E27BA7E040AC0A63E97743&Query=&SystemID=&ServiceTag=&contenttype=&os=&component=&lang=&doclang=&toggle=&dl=

 

[samtfaulkner]

Thanks for your Replies. But still no luck!

I tried pressing f12 and the menu comes up, so I choose the Cd Rom drive. Comes up with "Selected boot device not available - strike F1.."

If I make Cd rom the only choice of bootable device then restart with the disks in it comes up with "invalid system Disk _ Replace the disk then press any key"

 

[itadakimasu]

sounds like the boot sequence is pointing to something other than the cd rom. can you push f2 upon boot and go into bios to check this setting?

 

[samtfaulkner]

[1 onboard or usb cdrom drive
onboard sata hard drive
...
... ]
only the first one is enabled at the mo

 

[itadakimasu]

What disk do you have in the optical drive?

What kind of hard drive did you install( ata or sata )?

 

[samtfaulkner]

Got 3 sony cd -r, 2 with copy's of XP. one with UBUNTU, All bootable on my acer laptop.

40GB SATA hard drive

 

[Mattmig83]

Any resolutions here? I am having the same issue. I've tried 3 known working bootable CDs with three known working DVD / CD ROM drives.

 

[samtfaulkner]

no, still not working for me! I tried new Cd Drive, Dvd Drive (internal) hard disk, usb flash drive, usb hard drive; with 3 different working OS systems. Still no luck.

Would love to know if anyone can do this?!

 

[groo]

can you try running the HDDs in different modes?
I have 1 stsem were I have to run the Sata drve in IDE mode (or something like that)

how about new cables?

 

[aford10]

If you didn't try different cables, that would by my first thought.

Some BIOS' have a OS install mode. You may need to enable this in the BIOS.

Some CD/DVD drives don't read discs as well as others. Try using a few drops of water and a soft cloth to clean the bottom of the discs.

 

[dhawes99]

Sometimes the GX280's have motherboard problems, specifically leaky capacitors. You might look at the caps and see if there's something yellowish leaking onto the silver parts

 

[linuxpro]

The fix

unplugged the CD drive & set the DVD drive to be the Master
Clearing CMOS Settings

From linuxpro


Dell suck