I have a Dell Precision Workstation 420 that has a P3 1.0Ghz processor 1GB Ram. There are 4 hard disks. 2 9Gb and 2 36GB. 1 36GB is the master, the rest are slaves. I had been experiencing network issues as well as performance problems so I decided to format my primary drive and install windows xp sp 2 again. Before I got to the formatting part, I wanted to make sure that I could boot from CD and that's when things went wrong. I couldn't get to the BIOS to change the boot priority. I tried to boot from CD but it went straight to windows. I tried to go to the bios, it went straight to windows. I removed the CMOS battery, waited 5 minutes and replaced it. I can now get to the bios, however, I the motherboard does not recognize ANY of my drives. It shows unknown. I can't even boot to windows anymore. It just says cannot find drive 0 and give the f2 bios or f1 retry option. The hard drives are Fujitsu MAP3367NP (Both 36GB), MAJ3091MP(9GB), and HP d8608-60103. Any suggestions?

Did you actually replace the battery or just put the old one back into the MB battery holder. Try it again, but this time use a new fresh battery. It is highly likely that the battery has failed.

Hey, thanks for the suggestion. The computer I was working on was my dad's. When it couldn't read the hard drives, he freaked out and took it to a more knowledgeable computer person than myself. He said that guy had it up and running in 15 minutes after switching a BIOS setting. Which one? He couldn't verify that. Again thanks for taking the time to help. Catch you on the next go round.