Why/How do Dell set up their PC's like this?

[Zak33]

Hi guys,

Just gonna have to reinstall XP on a mates PC as it's fubar. No idea what occured, but MSN was running, 4 million chat boxes, while his daughter planned conquering the world, or whatver teenage girls MSN about, and she got a pop up, didnt know what it was, and the PC locked and now wont reboot.

Sticks somewhere in XP boot, just after the famous mup.sys.

But, the question is, WHY do Dell install XP on a SATA drive using the RAID controller?

And what was Cntrl F11 supposed to do, cos after 25 minutes on the phone to Dell's India call centre, hitting Cntrl F11 at boot, nowt happened and I gave up.

Any idea why/how they set up their PC's?

[Koolpc]

I think they have aliens doing it!

[kidzer]

Try F12 on boot, all the Dell's i've worked on have it as their own boot menu with Dell Diagnostic stuff, and I think you can re-image the HD from it too, I can't remember for sure though

[directhex]

that key combo loads the dell diagnostic software from a hidden partition iirc

[kidzer]

Aaah, that'll be what i'm remembering then

[Zak33]

I tried all the F key combos, and none of them worked.

Why use a RAID controller? for one Sata drive?

[Sticky Mick]

Is it a USB keyboard by any chance? If so it might not be initialising in time before the lock up.
Therefore try a PS2 keyboard.

If it was my PC, i.e home built, I'd try a restore and a FIXMBR, but because it's a Dell they like to be awkward so you have to phone their premium rate helpline.

They're not even built like normal PCs

[burble]

From walking around the Dell factory in Limerick on Tuesday I saw that all the machines are imaged using Ghost. I'm not a fan of images that my department haven't physically built and tested themselves so we have Dell put our image onto our machines in the factory.

[Zak33]

From walking around the Dell factory in Limerick on Tuesday I saw that all the machines are imaged using Ghost. I'm not a fan of images that my department haven't physically built and tested themselves so we have Dell put our image onto our machines in the factory.

now that's interesting...you must buya lot of PC's from them! to get your own way.

It was a USB keyboard, and I thought of that...except it has no PS2 plugs just usb.

I've reinstalled XP, as Dell provide all the right disks, and it's a good PC again....but I stilldont fully understand their logic.

I set BIOS to ignore RAID and use the normal SATA controller and it installed like a dream...as you'd expect.

[burble]

now that's interesting...you must buya lot of PC's from them! to get your own way.

I think we've spent about £350k or so (mostly on servers and software) in the last 12 months. You don't need to have a big account to get the imaging service from them, but smaller accounts may have to pay a fee on top of the cost of the hardware.