I've been working at this for about a week and have reached a stalemate. I picked up a Dell Dimension 4300 not to long ago and I wanted to upgrade the processor from a 1.6Ghz P4 @1.75V to something along the lines of a 2.4Ghz Celeron or 2.0Ghz P4 both @1.5V
This shouldn't be an issue I read many articles on the forum that says the board would support any P4 but all recommended a BIOS update before doing anything. I currently have the original A02 BIOS that shipped with the unit and wanted to update it to A06. After struggling to make a bootable floppy disk in both Linuxon another PC (Using Wine) and Windows XP on this machine, I finally have disks that are able to boot. I put it into the system only for it to come up with "Press f1 to retry boot, press f2 for setup"
I then read many articles about IDE controllers going bad on people's hard disks on this system but nothing about the floppy drives. I know the drive and controller work since XP and Linux Puppy can access it. I tried replacing the IDE cable after reseating the original one multiple times. I even replaced the FDD outright to only get the same results. I'm stuck with this situation, I would prefer not to have to scrap this machine and to get Linux running on it, just with a better CPU. And even then I would like to have an updated BIOS.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what to do next?
Dell Dimension 4300
BIOS version A02
Pentium 4 @ 1.6Ghz
768MB SDRAM
40GB HDD
Geforce4 MX440