Dimension 4550 Harddrive issues

Hi

This is my problem,

I have an old computer which I am fixing to donate, it has two hard drives

One 60 gigs (this is where windows is installed)
One 500 gigs this is where my personal data is installed

I removed the 500 gig drive since I want to keep my data
Once I removed this drive the computer does not boot up
nor recognize the drive I lfeft in there (setting master) , it states unknown device.

When I put back the 500 gig (setting Slave) drive the computer boots up no problem
both drives are detected


So both drives work if slave/master setting used
one drive connected as master and the computer does not detect it

same goes with making the 500 gig the master or cable select and connecting it

I have removed the battery to reset the cmos (still no)
I have changed cables
I have tried to reset the bios
I have looked at all configurations in the bios
there is no setting that can help me re detect the new drive

Please help


Any of you can figure this out I would greatly appreciate it
Thanks

 

When you changed the drive to master, you changed drive cable locations and well as the jumpers on the drive, correct?

 

Yes I did,

Only solution I have found so far is to add another hard drive smaller one to it as a slave

it works but still does not solve the issue of stand alone hard drive being able to function without slave

 

Do you have an XP install disk or a bootable recovery console disk? I think the problem may be with the MBR or boot.ini

 

Actually the 4550 should have SATA, not PATA for hard drives. Unless someone changed it, so no need to specify master or slave.

 

I have been fighting with a 4550 for a couple of hours trying to get it to detect a hard drive. Both IDE channels detected a cdrom on both primary & secondary channels. NONE of them would detect a hard drive. I used 4 know good hard drive, yet none were detected.

I then went to Google & found these forums. I noted the OP mentioned that it stopped working when he removed one of the drives. That got me to thinking I should try hooking up TWO hard drives. Soon as I did that... BOOM the BIOS would then detect the hard drives just fine.

Kind of a wierd one, I hadn't seen that happen before. I'm not going to dwell on it....I'll do the same, just throw a small drive on as a secondary and leave it at that.

Just thought I'd throw that out there.

cheers

 

Again, you need to use a SATA drive and the sata ports, not IDE. If you are only going to use PATA. you need to set the hard drive for Master, and place on its own IDE port. As for the cdrom & dvd, one needs to be set for master, the other slave, and on their own IDE interface. If I recall though, the 4550 only has one IDE interface, since SATA was what came with that machine for hard drives.

As for the bios, did you check the settings in there to see what the boot order is, and if it is even showing the drive? Also make sure that you are using a 80pin cable for the drives, not 40 pin. Worst case secenario, the IDE controller chipset went tits up, since that is about a 5 to 6 year old machine.