BIOS not recognizing the hard drive

Question

System: Dimension 4550   I wake up this morning and saw the system was frozen. So I pushed button to reboot the system. On the  BIOS screen, it shows:   Primary hard disk drive 0 not found Primary hard disk drive 1 not found   I opened box and unpluged the cable to the second hard drive (Primary drive 1) which I added a while ago. Then went into setup (F2) to turn off the Primary drive 1. It still doesn't work, the BIOS screen shows:   Primary hard disk drive 0 not found   I unpluged the IDE cable and reconnected, still doesn't work.   The lights on the back of the system read as:   A: off B: on C: on D: yellow   Any idea?

Shawn.S · Answer

Try entering the Bios setup and clearing the NV ram in your machine. Then restart and see if it will redetect the hard drive.   To do this turn on the Caps lock, num lock and scroll lock lights, Hit ALT+E to clear the NV ram, then ALT+F to reset it to default settings.   Shawn

Shawn.S · Answer

I would test them in another machine before replacing them. It seems odd that both drives would fail at the same time. Odd but not impossible. Shawn.

lfuzzy · Answer

Thanks for the reply. I was able to fix the problem by replacing the IDE cable.

ejn63 · Answer

If that doesn't work, your hard drive has failed - replace it.

Storage, Drives & Media

BIOS not recognizing the hard drive

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