Looking at a Dell 4600 (IDE drive) for a friend who had a problem with XP, and they decided to run the F12 (Dell restore). Luckily, it failed or they would have lost all their files. Unluckily, the PC now won't boot and has a small blinking cursor top left of screen.

Put the HDD on another PC, and could see all the files. Copied all files to another HDD, and reformated.

Thought was to rebuild XP on Dell using the Dell re-installation disk, etc, and copy over data files.

Put reformatted (NTFS) back in Dell, and tried to boot from Dell re-installation CD, but won't boot CD. Sits at blinking cursor top left of screen.
BIOS sees the HDD and CD

Put the HDD on another PC, and installed XP - no problems.
Put the XP disk back on the Dell, and all I get is the blinking cursor,top left.

This is when I read about the battery as a possible reason, and switched batteries obviously not realising the consequences.

Primary IDE controller not recognising anything, but secondary does recognise HDD and CD, but won't boot CD, or HDD.

Rubbered ...

Rannoch