When the CDROM drive is installed, does the System Setup (BIOS) recognize the drive on the secondary controller? Are you able to boot directly to the Windows 2000 CD? If you use a DOS bootdisk, are you able to retrieve a directory listing of the CD within the drive?

1. The BIOS doesn't recognise the CDROM as a secondary controller

2. Am unable to boot directly to Win2k

3. When I use a DOS bootdisk am unable to get a dir listing for the CD within the drive.

was this question ever answered. I have an optiplex gx1 as well and it doesn't recognized the CD-rom. Everything appears to be hooked up correctly. Are there some W2K drivers I need?

I would be interested also.  I bought 2 GX110's. One with a CDROM and one without and am putting a Liteon CDRW in it.  Neither will recognize the CDROM while using Win2k bootup diskettes.  Any suggestions as to why it won't recognize the CDROM?

I and many others have the same problem (see post "Secondary Hard Drive 0 not found"). I installed Win2K with the original CD-ROM drive that came with my G1 which, fortunately, was still working. I booted from my original Win98 startup floppy disk and that, of course, enables CD support. Then I installed Win2K from a DOS prompt running Winnt.exe in the \i386 directory on the CD.

Win2K works fine with the new CD-RW drive that the BIOS does not recognize (it forces me to press F1 on each boot up to ignore). If I do a warm boot, however, I don't get the error - just on a cold boot. (I don't know if Win98 would have recognized the drive or not.)

My best guess is that it is a BIOS limitation, even with the latest revision. DELL, PLEASE TELL US IF THIS IS THE CASE. It will save us good customers a lot of frustration. Thank you.

I am also having a similar problem, although it is with a "dell system optiplex GXPro 180 USB Enhanced"

I'm also trying to install windows 95 on it.  It refuses to recognize the CD drive, and the BIOS (Pheonix ROM BIOS PLUS Version 1.10 A06) doesn't seem to have heard of a CD-ROM drive's existence.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

I have not resolved this issue. Clearing NVRAM did not work for me (as others suggested to try). Seems to be a BIOS limitation, but I can't get a Dell Moderator to step in and answer this once and for all. It's like they don't want to say that so they don't have to upgrade the BIOS again. But I wish they would just say so to put this issue to bed, and add something like "...this BIOS is old and we cannot (or will not) upgrade it further. just live with the problem..." etc.

Let us know if you find out anything (it's not courteous to use the Forum and if/when you resolve an issue, not post it).

Also see the thread "Secondary Hard Drive 0 not found" and "Dell Moderator: Middle or End Connector?" for more things tried. Good luck.

Same trouble.....but on my Optiplex G1 I found that the bios will recognize my cdrom if I plug it into the IDE1 slot on the motherboard. I then plug the hard disk into IDE2, set my hard drive as secondary drive 0 and set the boot sequence. This setup is working for me. I don't know how this will work for anyone else since I'm booting from LILO into Linux - but I don't think that the O/S matters. ( Also, I flashed the BIOS to version A10 in my attempts to get things going - don't know if this had any effect on the outcome.)  

Message Edited by jleybo on 03-04-2004 10:16 PM

Good for you. Could you do one thing? Put the HD back on IDE1 and move the CD-ROM drive back to IDE2, and reset the boot sequence and reboot and see if the F1/F2 error alert is still gone. This will tell me if it was the BIOS upgrade that fixed it. Thank you.

(I'm reluctant to flash the BIOS, and want to do only if absolutely necessary. Very rarely, the flashing goes wrong, then your computer is useless until you replace the BIOS chip. Also, since none of the issues fixed in the release notes for the A10 BIOS (I did download it) had anything to do with my problem, I followed my main principle: "if it ain't broke, don't break it!")

you guys have checked the jumper settings on the drive right?

And there is no bios limitation of seeing a cd drive. If it can't see it and the jumpers are set correctly then you have either a) a bad drive b) a bad cable c) a bad port on the motherboard d)corrupted plug and play config in the bios or e) a bad power lead.

So you can eliminate most of these possibilites in one step.

Unplug both the power lead and data cable at the drive's end from the cdrom and plug it into the hard drive (make sure the hard drive is set to cable select on the jumpers) and then see if it sees the hard drive. If so then it's a bad cdrom drive.