Alienware D9T D900T

I have an Alienware laptop which I am attempting to reformat with Windows XP Pro

I finally was able to get the laptop to recognize the hard drive and came to a screen with five options. I'm not running two drives but it seemed I had to tell it to do RAID in the bios in order to get anywhere

After I got the screen with 5 options. I was totally confused but called a friend who said play around with #1 (Auto Setup) (see picture attached) because you can't hurt anything.

I thought this was good advice because I had just wiped the drive with killdisk and there was no date to be lost

After changing one thing in option #1, I can no longer access my bios. I have even gone so far as removing the cmos battery and resetting the bios but the screen says its scanning for IDE drives and at the bottom says press F2 to enter setup. Every time I do, it goes to a black screen with a small cursor flashing in the upper left part of the screen

Any suggestions would be welcomed...

Thanks

 

try pulling the hard drive out and clearing the cmos. when you clear the cmos remove all power and unplug the battery and then hold the power button for about a minute so the computer fully discharges. This should help you to clear it out and enter into setup again. I think it might have a old profile in there causing problems. In in doubt check the manual. The real issue hear is getting windows loaded onto it. You will either have to make a custom windows install disk with nlite to integrate the drivers for the ide raid contoller or use a diskette loaded with them and a usb floppy drive to load them when it asks or the windows setup wont proceed as it wont be able to detect the drive without the proper driver in place.