Dimension 8200 Bizarre Hardware Problem. 1200

James,

I have had nearly the identical problem over the past few weeks with an 8200 running XP Pro:

On occasion, when booting, I will hear a clicking sound, and be greeted with a system message advising me to hit F1 to continue, or F2 to enter Set up. Hitting F1 would simply cause the message to repeat. Hitting F2 would load Set up, and I could see that the hard drive information was "Unknown", instead of the actual data normally present.

The first time this happened, I turned the machine off, opened it up, and pressed the IDE cable and power cable for my hard drive, thinking that they may have been loose. This cured the problem for the time, but I went ahead and bought a new drive, thinking the old one was failing.

I have tested the old drive, and it pbuttes all tests. I then thought that the on-board controller was the culprit, and bought an IDE controller card, installed it, installed a new drive, ghosted it, but have not yet swapped it out with the original drive, as the older drive seems to be just fine.

The problem has cropped up again a couple of times, and I have concluded (without yet confirming it) that there could be short in the power-on button on the machine. BTW, after the problem first presented itself, I updated the BIOS to A09, and for the heck of it, upgraded the chip from a P4 2Ghz (400fsb) to a 2.8Ghz (400fsb). The machine seems to be just fine, but after a couple of weeks of no problem, I ran into a situation that caused me to manually shut the machine down (a software update was hanging). After I manually shut it down, I waited about 15 seconds, rebooted, and the clicking sound returned, with the same system message (F1, F2, etc.) Since I really had to press the power button hard to shut down, I waited about half an hour (only because I was too peeed), and then gave a normal, quick, light press to the power button, and everything went fine after that.

I hope you come across a solution soon; if you do, please update us.

Pat