Dimension 4600 Primary Drive 0 Not Found

Lotus74,

Boot into the bios and see if the drives are listed.

It says:

Diskette Drive A: 3.5 inch, 1.44 MB

SATA Primary Drive... OFF

SATA Secondary Drive... OFF

Primary Master Drive... Unknown Device

Primary Slave Drive... OFF

Secondary Master Drive... CD-Rom Device

Secondary Slave Drive... OFF

IDE Drive UDMA... ON

Under Boot Sequence, it says the hard disk is not installed. I have no idea what's up.

Not at the moment since this is the only desktop in the house.

Primary Master Drive... Unknown Device

The system is trying to see the drive. Can you test that hard disk drive in another system?

The easiest thing to try is take the hard disk drive to another PC (Best Buy support might be able to do this) and connect it and see if that bios identifies the drive. If it does, your motherboard might be suspect.

Ok, I will test the hard disk on another machine. Thanks. Any other suggestions?

Ummm...Am I correct in assuming the primary drive (boot hard drive) is an IDE PATA Drive, rather than a SATA drive, because your Primary SATA port is set to off?

Try clearing NVRAM:

EDIT: Do this with the hard drive installed

Power off and disconnect PC from the wall

Press/hold power button for ~15 sec

Open the case and remove the battery from the motherboard

Press/hold the power button again for ~30 sec

Reintall the battery, right-side-up!  (How old is this battery?)

Try to boot with only mouse, monitor and keyboard connected.

Ron

To answer your first question, um yes? Ha. This is my family's computer so I'm not too familiar with it but I'm pretty sure it doesn't use SATA. It doesn't.

I followed your instructions and now it just says: Diskette drive 0 seek failure.

Diskette Drive A: 3.5 inch, 1.44 MB

SATA Primary Drive... OFF

SATA Secondary Drive... OFF

Primary Master Drive... OFF

Primary Slave Drive... OFF

Secondary Master Drive... CD-Rom Device

Secondary Slave Drive... ATAPI Device

IDE Drive UDMA... ON

It also says hard disk drive not installed. The battery is about four or five years old since I believe the PC was purchased in 2005. Thanks.

What color are the 4 diagnostic LEDs on rear of the tower when you try to boot up? If not all green, look up error codes here

<ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>

. What color is the power button on the tower? Green/amber; solid/blinking?

According to your last post, all the drive ports on the motherboard are OFF, so that may be why it's not finding a hard drive. Go into BIOS setup and set Primary Drive 0 to AUTO.

Do you have an internal floppy drive in this system? If not, that could be causing the Diskette drive 0 seek failure. So while in BIOS setup, change the Di skette Interface setting to OFF (might say: DISABLED). If you have an internal floppy, it may have failed (or there's a non-bootable floppy disk in the drive). If there's no floppy in the drive, you may want to unplug the power cable to the internal floppy drive AND change the Diskette Interface setting to OFF in BIOS setup.

But lets back up a minute. The original problem was a thermal event, meaning the system probably shut down because it overheated. So why did you replace the PSU? Did the fan inside the PSU fail? Are you sure the case fan is working, and the heatsink is correctly attached to the CPU? Check that the heatsink retention clips are properly locked as shown here, but do not remove the heatsink and CPU.

If you continued to use the system after the initial thermal event and it continued to overheat, it's always possible you cooked something. :emotion-6:

Ron

The diagnostic lights are all solid green with the exception of D, which is solid amber. That's the first thing I looked up. The power lights are green. There is an internal FD drive.

I just followed your instructions. The heat sink is secure. When I changed the settings, it just says the primary drive is an unknown device/ not installed.

I replaced the PSU because the power light was solid amber and the system would shut down or not boot at all. So, I cleaned fans and heat sink. After that, the system booted fine but shutdown about 5 minutes later. That's when I ordered a new PSU. I only saw the "Thermal Event" once.

Thanks for your help so far. I really appreciate it.

It is sounding like the hard drive or maybe the PATA controller on the motherboard failed.  If you disconnect the hard drive power cable, will it boot from a bootable floppy, or from a bootable CD (eg, XP Reinstallation CD)?

Ron

I tested the hard drive on another PC and it was fine. Of course this just made me more frustrated. I painstakingly disconnected and then carefully reconnected everything. Three guesses what happened. I can't believe it. I don't know exactly what fixed it but I'm just glad this is over. Thanks to Chris and especially Ron for all your helpful suggestions. I actually learned a lot.

:emotion-21: