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Dim 4600 adding Seagate ST3120215ACE PATA Drives
I have installed two of these drives in the Dimension 4600. Installed Win XP and all appropriate drivers. I used the Seagate Disk Wizard to setup and format the Secondary drive and everything seems to be working fine. The O/S sees the drives and not problems . . . except . . . I keep getting this error at startup:
Dell System Dimension 4600i Series
Bios Version A12
www.dell.com
Secondary drive 1 no found
Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility
I strike F1 and all is good. How can I get rid of this "error".
The BIOS setting for both the Primary Master and Slave Drive show Hard Drive. Both show the correct drive id, capacity and are set to Auto.
Even used disk management to reassign drive letters for the CD drive and Slave Drive without issue.
Any help would be appreciated.
jackshack
6.4K Posts
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July 25th, 2013 15:00
First, there is nothing wrong with your computer. The error you see is most likely because you do not have two DVD/CD ROM drives, but the System Setup (F2 during self test after starting the computer) is programmed to have the second drive turned on. If you do have two DVD/CD drives, the slave drive may have failed.
To correct the problem, replace the CMOS back-up cell if you haven't done that in a while. It's a CR 2032 located on the motherboard. When that is done, go to System Setup and turn off the second drive on your second IDE channel. When you replace the back-up cell, the BIOS defaults will be loaded, so you will probably need to turn off the diskette drive as well. If you forget to do that, you will get a seek error and need to strike F1 to continue as you are doing now.
gman94568
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July 26th, 2013 12:00
Thank you. That makes sense. I misinterpreted the error message. It does only have one CD drive. Not sure of the BIOS settings. I will check that the next time I have access to the machine. Replacing the battery is a good suggestion so I will do that when I am in there. Currently I am running XP with 512 MB of memory so I will do that when my additional memory comes in. Thanks again.