F1 on bootup

dell inspiron 530; windows xp wiped hard drive; reinstalled XP; now get an F1 on boot up; must click on F1 to get it to continue to boot, works fine after that; how do I get rid of this F1 problem?
i did change the battery on bios board. no change.

I had that sort of thing in the past, I went into CMOS and just made sure that it was set correctly for the current configuration. Setting it correctly is based per BIOS, you can't really tell someone what to set. Just make sure that the hard drive is first in the boot sequence, and that it sees all of the hardware. Good luck!

What is the FULL error message?

no error message; this is during boot; it asks for F1 to continue

Well, what Guts3d said or another CMOS battery is the fix (normally).


The replacement you bought could be 'bad' - with no error message it is almost always hardware related afaik.

Swapped battery again; same issue, asks for F1 on startup; hit F1 and it will run correctly after that.

Check Bios for what is shown for hardware.

Do you have all those things (eg, if a floppy is targetted but you don't have one, you'll get that error afaik).

You could try setting the bios to setup defaults and see if that does it.
Then begin resetting stuff till it you hit the error, if you do.

Hi dqdave1,

I would like to know if you ever changed the Jumper Settings on your PC MotherBoard. Because there are three needles on your PC MotherBoard set alltogether used to remember the settings of your BIOS or to discard the changes. So Please elalorate on it.

If this is a brand name PC sometimes they have a default to look for a device that isnt' present and you get hit with a f1 to continue screen. If you know enough about the bios and what is inside your PC I suggest making sure the correct things are set for what's there and what's not. IE if it is looking for a floppy drive that isn't present.

Somewhere in the BIOS settings there should be an option to prompt for F1 on all errors/all errors but keyboard/no errors.