I picked up a dell dimension 8100. the tower has major issues I am attempting to fix. After removing uneeded cards, installing a missing APG video card, installing a "PREPARED" 40 gig C drive because there was no C drive, I finely got it to work to some extent. My issue is that the dvd rom and the cd rw drives are NOT being detected. Not only can I not play discs but more importantly I cannot attempt to reload the OS, XP, onto a 180 or 250 gig I have. The tower also has a video with analog in/out jacks which I would like to use as a replacement for my separate box. How do I get the drives to be detected, how do I use the DELL specific RESTORE BY SYMANTEC to go back to 2002 settings, or install the drives with drivers of my choice? Is there a REALLY FREE third party software program that will do that? I even replaced the IDE cable. There IS a net connection. The tower is stable. My mail client works. Start up is very slow, and the SAFE MODE screen appears every time. The drives are NOT listed on one of the BLACK screens that shows up before the SAFE MODE screen. Solutions please.
give it up and start learning what you are doing... you have a "prepared" hdd.. what the hell does that mean?.. is it a real OEM setup drive for that precise machine?.. doesn't sound like it so I suggest you find an operating system to INSTALL PROPERLY!!! the bs "restore" crap never works properly .. not that you can because you don't have the original drive with the waste of space system restore partition on it) and usually needs trade only bloody expensive boot disks to access.. so quit while you are ahead and use a brain to find out what drivers you need.. Dell are bastards for drivers.. the 8100 is a pile of crap.. unreliable.. misnamed eeproms which make windoze drivers a complete nightmare.. even dell list the wrong ones which don't work... bad caps.. but they seem to run linux ok so long as you keep it lean and avoid the huge desktops with bloat.. xfce4 or fluxbox/rox work very well on these obsolete junkers.. and a proper distro like fedora or debian seems to have everything to run all the hardware out of the box... the 8100 is slow as a dog with xp.. think they are basically 2k/me machines.. celerons.. and feel underpowered even looking at the low end specs.. slow pos systems.. hope you found it on the street thrown out... because they aren't worth spending any cash on whatsoever!!!
