Mystery! No hard drive hooked up, but computer works!

Question

I have a dimension 8200 with 512 ram and 40 gig HD. Pulled the hard drive out and sent it to my brother. Bought a 200 gig hard drive from a Staple's store, but the connections didn't match for the data cable ( flat cable ). The power cable did match though. I put the hard drive in and connected the power cable but not the data cable. For some reason I closed the case and turned the power on. To my shock.. the windows XP screen came on and loaded. Then my old desktop from my 40 gig hard drive which was at my brother's house came up on the screen... with all of my programs present. I looked at the properties of drive C, and it showed a 40 gig hard drive when in fact the new drive in it was a 200 gig. ( but remember... the hard drive only has the power cable hooked up.. not the data cable) Then i looked at the C drive files. It showed all the programs in there that i had on my old hard drive and they all worked fine still. Then i went on the internet and downloaded 2 games.. one of them being over a GIG in size.. and they work. There is not 2 hard drives in this computer. How is this thing working and recognizing my old hard drive that is not even there???  I'm at a loss to find an answer.

osprey4 · Answer

Sounds like a CarTalk puzzler. In fact, maybe I'll send this one in. 'Hey, I took the engine out of my car but it still runs!'

kirkd · Answer

The answer is that the 40 GB drive is still in the computer. Perhaps you sent your brother your CD or DVD drive.

tim5ny · Answer

I assure you that I know what a hard drive is, and that it is not in the computer. Can this be possible?

rickmktg · Answer

tim5ny wrote: I assure you that I know what a hard drive is, and that it is not in the computer. Can this be possible?   No it can't be possible.

tim5ny · Answer

Okay.. I will open it up when I get home tomorrow and look again to see if per chance that I did make a mistake and pull out one of the other drives instead, but I'm pretty sure that the top two drives are a cd/rw and dvd drive.. then below that was the hard drive.. and then a floppy drive below that... but I may have mistakenly grabbed the floppy drive by mistake. The drive that I removed was the third one down. I was in a hurry when I did it, so I'm not going to say for sure that I didn't pull out the floppy drive by mistake. If I am wrong, then I will come back and shamefully confess that this post was ridiculous.... and I will also be embarrased because I called a couple of my computer geek friends who also said that I was crazy.

tim5ny · Answer

OOps!  I'm an idiot!  I pulled the floppy drive out by mistake!

rickmktg · Answer

tim5ny wrote:

OOps! I'm an idiot! I pulled the floppy drive out by mistake!

:smileyvery-happy: You should be proud of yourself for coming back and admitting it. We now have to notify Ripley's Believe It Or Not to cancel the TV appearance of your "haunted" Dell computer...

tim5ny · Answer

Hehe!  I feel like an idiot.. :smileysad:

rickmktg · Answer

tim5ny wrote:

Hehe! I feel like an idiot.. :smileysad:

We've all made mistakes in messing with our computers, some worse than others. You lost no data, you didn't break a machine, you simply posted info. Don't worry about it. If I told you what I've done in 24 years of computers...

Storage, Drives & Media

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