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General discussion

change bios to reformat

Jan 8, 2005 7:50AM PST

I'm trying to reformat my computer. It's about 3 yrs old, an IBM, machine type: 2251, model number: VAU, and serial number: 78-ZR334. It has 128 mb ram and pentium 3 processor, in case that's relevant.
Anyway, I put a XP OS cd and restarted my computer. It didn't pay notice to the cd and booted up normally. I then tried to go into the BIOS (or what I thought was the BIOS) to change the boot order, but I can't seem to find anything relevant to boot order. I've looked around on the web (http://www-1.ibm.com/support/search.wss?rs=0&lang=en&loc=en_US&r=10&cs=iso-8859-1&rankfile=0&cc=us&spc=&stc=&apar=include&q1=2251-VAU&q2=bios&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&sort=rk&tc=&dc=&dtm) , but can't seem to find anything. I've tried updating the BIOS but that hasn't seemed to change anything. Do you know what I'm doing wrong. Or can I reformatting using some other methond?

Discussion is locked

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BIOS
Jan 8, 2005 8:16AM PST

How to get to it varies. Some companies require you press the delete key and others you press a function key while the computer is booting. When your computer boots, do you have any instructions how to get into the setup? Sometimes it is listed on the splash screen. Once you get into the setup, change the boot order so the CD-ROM is first.

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What Operating system came with your system?...
Jan 8, 2005 9:55AM PST

Was it Windows ME? Look here. I notice that your system has a system recovery partition if you press f11 at start up it will give you recovery options. F1 is to your bios, or so it says at the ibm pages you provide. I will look into it more. Also here.

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According to what I read you put in the XP cd when...
Jan 8, 2005 10:03AM PST

Windows is running and start from there. Check out here.