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15395
January 18th, 2011 16:00
Hard Disk Drive not recognized by OS
Hi.
I purchased a Dell Dimension 8200 at a garage sale in my church. I opened it and found that it had no hard disk drives - just the power cable and data ribbon. I purchased a WD Caviar Blue Desktop Hard Drive 320GB PATA 7200 RPM 3.5" drive and installed it. I still get the same error - "Primary hard disk drive 0 not found" . The jumper setting is at master - slave right now. From reading posts on the Internet I have done all of the following things
- Changed the jumper settings to M-S, C-S, No Jumper and re booted each time I changed the jumper setting with the same error.
- I have pressed F2 to get into the set up and changed the Drive setting to Auto after which I have gotten "Unknown Device"
- I have pressed ALT + F
- Also pressed Ctrl + Alt + B
- I have also put in a new motherboard battery
- I reset all the passwords by removing the jumper, starting and stopping the m/c and putting back the jumper
- I have also changed the boot sequence and booted from the CD rom and after some portion of XP is installed , it tells me that it cannot proceed because there is no disk
And not received anything but the F1 to reboot F2 to enter set up message. The above items have not been tried in that order - they have just been tried.
If you could please could you tell me if there is anything that I missed or if there is a special sequence from 1 through 7 above that will allow the system to recognize the hard disk drive. Thanks for reading.
osprey4
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January 18th, 2011 17:00
Hi Gnl1954,
Well, you've certainly tried everything. However, if you change things around too quickly, you might be causing a BIOS "confusion" problem. The drive should definitely be set to cable select, plugged into the connector at the end of the cable, and you want to be sure you are using an 80-wire cable. So set that up, then boot to the BIOS and try to detect the drive. It might say unknown at first, but if you reboot once or twice, then it should be properly detected.
You're going to get the F1, F2 prompt until you've got an OS on the drive, so don't worry about that. Keep the CD drive as the first boot device, with the hard drive as second.
Gnl1954
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January 18th, 2011 18:00
Many thanks Osprey.
Its a morale booster if nothing else. I will try this and respond back in the next day or so. How do I ensure that the cable is an 80 wire?
Gnl1954
Gnl1954
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January 18th, 2011 19:00
Hi Osprey.
I did as you suggested, booting from the CD each time now for the 4th time. Each time the system comes back with this message
"set up did not find any hard disc drive installed in your computer. Make sure that any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to your computer, and that any disc related hardware configuration is correct. This may involve running a manufacturers supply diagnostic set up program. Set up cannot continue. To quit setup press F3"
I'll look for a post tomorrow evening. Thanks for your assistance.
Gnl1954
osprey4
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January 19th, 2011 04:00
Are you still seeing "unknown" in the BIOS? There may also be a problem with the cable itself. You could try a new cable.
In response to Robin's post, PATA and IDE are the same thing. And the jumper setting should be CS, not master. The MA-SL jumper settings will rarely work in systems with two drives, but a jumper set to MA will not work for a single drive.
RobinBredin
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January 19th, 2011 04:00
Hi, Had a look at your specks HERE, and they you should have a IDE, and not a PATA Hard Drive. But, leave the jumper settings to Master, and only use Slave if your using a second Hard Drive.
Gnl1954
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January 22nd, 2011 12:00
Hi Osprey and Robin.
Thanks for all the advice so far. Here is the latest. I bought a new cable as well and when I attached it, the setup (F2) Primary Drive 0 showed "Hard drive" and 320 GB as the capacity. I then booted from the CD and I am back again to the F1 to reboot F2 to enter set up message. I packed up everything to return it and thought I'd try one last time. So I used the old ribbon cable and saw that the system recognized the hard drive (which earlier it had not). I thought I'd post once more to see if anyone had any more ideas. I know that the XP disk I am using works because I have used it to reinstall to my Thinkpad.
Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Gnl1954
osprey4
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January 22nd, 2011 14:00
So now the problem is booting to the XP disc. Do you have just the one CD drive? If you have two optical drives, you must use the top one to boot.
Gnl1954
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January 22nd, 2011 17:00
Yes I have two drives and I am using the top one from which to Boot.
osprey4
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January 23rd, 2011 06:00
Try swapping optical drives. Perhaps one can read your XP disc better.
I have had one experience with a Dimension 3000 that just didn't want to boot from a slipstreamed XP SP3 disc I made. Tried three different optical drives (CD-RW/DVD combo, CD-ROM, and DVD-RW). Never did figure out what the problem was, but found that an older Dell XP disc worked fine.