I am trying to install windows 98 on a dell latitude cpi laptop with no operating system or partitioned drives, and everything goes well until i try to run fdisk from the floppy boot disk and a message comes up "No fixed disks present". For some reason I believe the hard drive is not being recognized. I have a floppy and cd drive but I can't use them both at the same time as there is only one modular bay. In bios it says "none" for primary hard drive. Once while I was fiddling around with the computer I hit some key combination like ctrl-alt-delete while the computer was starting up and it went to a white screen that asked for the password to unlock the hard drive. Not knowing the password, I typed in random sequences a few times and it said invalid password then I entered "password" hoping to get lucky and it went to a screen that said "verifying password" and it did nothing for 3 hours until I finally turned it off. i got this computer from someone else with no knowledge of anything about it. Please help me with some suggestions please. Thanks.

Hey,

Check this link out from microsoft,

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309459

Thanks. How would I fix either "The jumper settings on the hard disk are incorrectly configured." or "The hard disk controller is defective or incorrectly configured in the computer BIOS."?

Help!! Anyone?

The MS link is not your problem.

You have fallen into the trap set on certain portables to ensure security in the event they are stolen. You need to find out how to defeat the bios lock on the model, and your best bet is email Dell and explain the problem. They should be able to supply you with a master key. The original key should also have been supplied in the documenatation with the PC, but your chances of recovering that are slim to non-existant.

You should also google with carefully selected words like "Dell xpi bios lock hard disk" and see if anything comes up. You will not be the only person to hit this problem, see here http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=98378