lockups in DOS??

[Butler]

I recently bought a Dell dimension, with a P3-800, running Win2K. I'm trying to fdisk, and format it to remove Win2K, so I can install 98 or Me on it (Haven't decided which yet.) Trouble is, this machine seems to be locking up at random in DOS. I'm starting the computer from a DOS system floppy (from bootdisk.com) and running everything from there... I've had it lockup in FDISK, in EDIT, and simply at a command prompt. When it does, it TOTALLY locks. Not only will it not except any input, but it seems the keyboard doesn't even work (I can't turn caps or numlock on or off.) I know, the first guess would be trouble with the keyboard, but I've tried 2 different ones, and it doesn't make any difference. Any ideas?

 

[Barefoot]

Well, the first thought that comes to mind is some sort of resource conflict. Try removing everything from your system except for the video card, hard drive, floppy drive, and the minimum amount of RAM possible. Use your boot disk to try to Fdisk the hard drive again, and then format it. If you still are having trouble, you may want to consider sending it back to Dell. Any system that won't run under such simplified conditions obviously is flawed.

 

[blizz]

Does it do it in win2k? I once had win95 hard freezing constantly on a socket 7 mobo. I decided to try and fdisk and reformat the harddrive only to find that it was also freezing in dos which to me indicated a heat problem. All my fans were running but when I checked the fan on top of my cpu it was a little loose and off center. I realigned it and tightened it up...problem went away.

Hope this helps.