Harddrive issue, PLZ help!!!

Ok guys here's what I did.
I have a Dell Dimension 8200 P4 1.8Ghz. XP pro. Maxtor 40 GB drive.

I had this old IBM harddrive laying around so I said let me install it to have some extra space. So I hooked up both the drives, Maxtor as primary and IBM as slave. then I go to power up my comp. and it wont get past the bios . the bios take a while to go trough and after the bios is complete and comes up saying this "Primary Hard Disk Drive 1 Not Found" "Strike F1 key to continue, F2 to run setup utulity"

Windows will not even start to boot or nothing. Any help will be appreciated, I removed the IBM drive already and left my Maxtor and it still shows me this, even when I connected the drive in other computers. I also tried a newer drive in my comp and it tells me the same thing "Hard disk not found". Thanks.

 

All I got is, check the cables then check them again. Did you change the jumper on the drive?

 

or another thing that could have happened is that the computer was looking for something that wasn't there, so it was confused. i'd go into the setup to see if it can detect any hard drive (instead of the bios expecting something that's not plugged in). Worst case scenario is that ESD killed your hard drive control board, and a hard drive RMA would be required, but let's try to make it work first before resorting to RMA'ing it.

 

I checked the cables and tried another cable and still the same thing, I went into the bios setup and it detects the harddrive, it shows that the device connected is a harddrive and the drive capacity.

What is ESD and how could it have killed my drive control board? and what is a harddrive RMA? would doing that erase my data?

How could connecting the old IBM drive have caused this? all this trouble for a crappy 3 extra gigs, that blows!

 

Electo Static Discharge = ESD. and rma is... i forgot it's basically giving it back to the manufacturer so they can send you a replacement. I have a friend who killed every hard drive he touched due to his build-up of static electricity... or at least that's my theory. i dont' think his magnetism is quite high enough to kill the drive

back on track now: we now know what hard drive the bios is expecting. now my question is what it really sees. have you tried the automatic hard drive detection feature of the bios? where it scans the IDE channels. If it expects and automatically detects the big 40gig, then it's alive and your computer's just confused... if it wont' sense it, then there's definitely something wrong with the 40gig drive.

 

Yes I have the auto detect on on the bios and it detects the drive and the size, but when the bios finishes booting the same screen comes up. I dont think my harddrive has any warranty left on it, i bought it back in 02 and my comp only had a 1 year warranty. About the comp being confused, how do I unconfuse it hehe so it can recognize the drive and let windows boot up?

RMA= return ??? authorization I think hehe

 

one thing you have not mentioned thus far is the jumper setting on the HDD. Was the maxtor set to master and the IBM set to slave. sometimes with older drives you have to place the jumper in the "cable select"setting.

worst case is you may have to set both to cable select and see if your motherboard will read them according to thier place on the IDE cable.

otherwise i would think of ESD, as was mentioned. best of luck to ya.

 

I did not set the jumper on the IBM HDD, nor the Maxtor, I just plugged in the Maxtor as the Master and the IBM as the slave, the IBM is no longer there( I grab my sledge hammer and smashed the crap out if it for causing me this trouble). One thing that happened is that I had my XP CD in the CD drive and after a long while it started to boot from the CD, but then it crapped out cause the CD was scratch and one of the files was corrupted. Do you think if I reinstall XP all this could be fixed? Like "Strogg" said that my computer is confused , how do I unconfuse it so It can recognize my HDD. Aawww my poor data, I dont wanna loose my data

 

u could try a repair install of XP ... that might help .. couldn't hurt anyway so far as i know

 

I was looking for an answer to the same problem and read through this thread. I went back to the machine and figured out the issue.

In the CMOS Setup I had the AUTO DETECT for the secondary drives. This cofuses the machine. I removed the Secondary Device second device (the CD-ROM IDE area). Then the machine detected everything correctly. For some reason you cannot have auto detect on when a device is not present.

Sincerely,
RonnyMc
(www.inkblotmedia.com)