How do I get Dell to boot to flash drive with new hard drive in computer?

conceptualclarity

Senior Member
I had an 80GB Seagate IDE hard drive in my Dell Dimension 2400 that was clearly dying. I have been using a boot CD to connect to the Internet for days now. I have replaced the old hard drive with an unused 250GB WD IDE drive and with difficulty gotten the computer to recognize it. I intended to boot to flash drive and use the boot CD to transfer an image of the Seagate drive from my external hard drive to the new hard drive. But the computer will only boot to flash drive when the new drive is removed. When the drive is in and I click Enter on "6. USB Flash Drive", I get the ""Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility" message over and over.

When I take the hard drive out, I can boot into flash drive again. I have A05 BIOS, and it appears to me from the Dell website that is as far as I can go.

How can I start booting into flash drive with my new hard drive in, just as I did with my old hard drive in?
 
could you somehow take a picture of the bios screen you're looking at? Dell bios is a little minimalist but should have a boot priority (and possible an advanced boot priority). what i mean by advance is you can set which hdd it boots from as the hdd option in boot and im assuming its either grouping your usb with your hdds or it's changing the boot priority to put the hdd in front of the usb. i personally have mine set to usb by default so everytime i run the computer with my ubuntu live usb it boots from that as opposed to my hdd or ssd. Hope this helps! also just thought of this, there are hotswap docks made my companies like thermaltake than can work through the usb port on your pc if you would want to try file recovery that way?
 
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