Following on from my last post about Dell hardware here it would seem that Dell machines do not like active SATA ports with nothing attached to them. I’m posting an update here in the hope that it will help frustrated people fix their issue.
I was using a Dell Dimension 9200 as a host to patch the firmware of some hard disks (see here for all the fun) and had to enable several of the SATA ports not normally needed. When I returned the donor machine to its owner I had mistakenly left SATA port 4 enabled and the owner was greeted with “Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility”.
Receiving this error every time you boot is annoying on a desktop, but a serious problem for a server in a data centre, so if you are scratching your head as to why your machine keeps halting on boot with this rather cryptic message check to see you haven’t left a port active after removing disks or altering the configuration of your machine.
This is indeed a serious problem when a server is involved. Dell should be smarter than this
Thank you VERY much for the solution! It works like a charm!!
Hi Heidi,
After a lot of remote Delll kit failed to reboot correctly I knew I had to warn people, I’m glad it helped.
Thanks
Niall Best
Hey that worked! Thanks.
I have a dimension 9200 and a couple years back installed a new 1TB harddrive. And ever since i noticed every time i reboot i get the annoying Strike F1 message. I tried checking the Setup menu in the beginning but couldn’t fix it and have been putting it off.
Finally this morning i decided to re-investigate this problem again. I tried updating the BIOS as suggested by other forums to no avail. Then I saw your blog and i thought i made sense so I tried it and it worked. =)
So simple in the end. Wasted few hours of my life on this nonsense but glad it is now finally resolved.
Thanks!
Hi there,
That is one of the main reasons I started this blog so if I managed to overcome something really obscure and irritating with computing I could write it down so other people didn’t have to suffer as much on these problems.
I’m glad you got your machine sorted out in the end.
Niall