I have been staring at performing automatic IDE for an hour now
 

Pc boots up and u think.everythings good.and quickly th page changes and ypu get a screen.that says Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS (blah blah blah) Dell System Optiplex 330 Series BIOS version A03. Performing automatic IDE configuration. No matter if i press f2, f8, or f12 i still end.up here. The front panel has a green 2, 3, and cylinder all lit up. I need major help. I do not think.any.drives are being.detected

I had a similar problem. can you boot from a live cd? I couldn't until I found a mageia 2 distro. check your ram too. I had a D600.

The aux power LED is yellow. Both fans are running. I have a wireless keyboard and mouse. No place to plug either one in. I changed the battery on the motherboard by disconnecting all the power then pulling it out. There has to be a way to get into this crazy machine. Im about to losey mind after 7 hrs straight

---------- Post added 05-05-13 at 08:22 AM ----------

Nice im in the bios .. Finally ! Haha .. Now what???????

STOP!

It may be things are just off because of the battery change but can you afford to have disk corruption?

Do what travalon said PLEASE, hunt down a bootable cd/usb stick(thumb drive). In bios make sure the first item to boot from is the cd-drive.

As far as bios is concerned, carefully, page by page, look at what it says and see if it matches what you KNOW is in the computer.

Fix the time and date, if you don't know the other stuff pick auto. I only use 1 serial(comm) port on one computer I own, I disabe them and parallel ports on everything else.

Once you boot from the cd see if everything boots properly.

You can then mount (usually just click) on your hard drive and see if you can see the files that should be there. If all goes well you can shut down pop out the cd/usb and try a reboot. If you cant see the files on the drive AT ALL. STOP. SHUTDOWN. POST BACK. And we'll try a few things.................

I usually boot a LM13 disk and everything works out of the box. I had to pull the hdd once and put it in an enclosure to check if it was ok. All the data was fine. DO NOT do it yet but there may be a BIOS update available.

You need to get and use a live cd!!!!!! Try to memtest your RAM with one and see what that does. If you keep on fooling with the motherboard and the power supply you are sure to break something.

Well? any progress?