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Dell Dimension 8200 Hangs after BIOS
Hello
I have recently had to replace my Hard Drive in my Dell Dimension 8200 as it started making some clicking noises and that was indicating it was failing so I got 2 replacement drives (As I wanted to have to Internal Hard Drives in the machine for tasks that I want to carry out on it!) and I put them both in and connected the power cables and IDE Ribbon cables to them and I powered on my Dell Dimension 8200 (of which they were put in) and when the DELL BIOS screen appears and I press F2 to enter into the BIOS the BIOS says Entering Setup after i push F2 then the screen disappears and then i am presented with a flashing cursor for about 5 minutes and then after a long 5 minute wait finally the BIOS setup is displayed and it has detected both drives so I dont understand why it takes a long time to display the BIOS!
Also sometimes (not all the time) when I am not entering the BIOS but I leave the computer to boot up into windows the BIOS screen will disappear like usual then the machine should boot windows from the hard drive but it does not it just stays with a black screen with a white flashing cursor in the tope left hand corner but it does not do this all the time and sometimes it will boot windows as normal and this black screen happens before Windows boots but after the BIOS has loaded!
Can someone help me please?
Thanks
fireberd
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August 10th, 2010 04:00
How did you set the new drives? They should be set for Cable Select with the "C" drive on then end of the ribbon cable. This is one possible problem.
Reseating the memory is another suggestion.
DCX4EVER
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August 10th, 2010 05:00
There should be a graphic located on each hard drive to indicate the proper pinouts to make the drives both cable select. Also your bios should have cable select optioned out as well. One last thing to check is to make sure the boot drive is the primary drive (black connector) and the second drive is secondary connector (gray connector) to the ribbon cable. Good Luck.
GarethS09
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August 10th, 2010 05:00
Both drives are set to cable select! just to make sure I have done it properly how do you do set them as cable select? The hard drives are Western Digital (Both are!)
GarethS09
38 Posts
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August 10th, 2010 06:00
Yeah I think I have done that on both drives but how do you set the BIOS on the Dell Dimension 8200 to be setup for cable select?
fireberd
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August 10th, 2010 08:00
There is nothing that I see in the BIOS for cable select setup.
Although Cable Select (may be labled CS or CSEL on the drives) is the normal setting, you can try the Master/Slave and see if it helps. Set the "C" drive as the Master and the other as the Slave. I remember this working on a couple of systems back in the "old" Dell user forum days.
GarethS09
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August 10th, 2010 08:00
Ok I will try that. Why do you need to change the drive to cable select or master/slave?
jackshack
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August 10th, 2010 12:00
The computer must have a means of telling the difference between drive 0 and drive 1. In older computers the means of doing this was to strap the boot drive as a master and strap the additional drive as a slave. About ten years ago they started omitting the drive select connection on the middle connector. Doing this automatically causes the drive on that connector to be detected as a slave drive. The connector at the end of the cable automatically causes that drive to be the master. In order for the hard drives to be properly recognized with one of these cables it is necessary that both drives be strapped as cable select.
Nearly all IDE cables found today are made in this fashion, but there are evidently some cables that aren't wired to support a cable select system. If you have one of those cables you still need to strap the drives in the old style master/slave configuration.