Calling all supergeeks! Need serious assistance!
I recently picked up an old Dell DV051 Dimension 3100
from a guy at work.It was left behind by another office that was evicted and never claimed,so he took it home and just stored it.He couldn’t figure out how to get into it.It was password protected and I wanted to set it up at home to do some hobby stuff,but couldn’t get into it to do anything. I took it to a guy who “supposedly” had a degree in computer science,and knows how to bypass the password,clean the hard drive up and get it back to me ready to use and put my own stuff on it. Well, I got it back,and this is what I got when I fired it up:
NTLDR is missing
Press CNTL+ALT+DEL to restart
AND it also says that drives 1 & 3 are missing....
It was loaded w/Windows XP professional,and now shows that it has Windows 98 on it....
I think the guy switched hard drives on me or something.
What can I do? Should I just go buy a new hard drive for it,install Windows software on it or is this existing hard drive salvageable?
The “ntldr” missing indicates there is probable multiple installs of the operating system, i.e. it might have been set up to boot to 98 or XP. Usually you get prompted on boot up to choose which.