Help

Hi
Dell dimension 3000 desktop...when i bought it had one hard drive one cd drive.then addded maxtor 200 GB hard drive and Memorex CD/Dvd Writer...cloned old drive to new one and booted from there...some weeks ago computer messed up giving lot of error and problem so decided to format hard drive and put os..ordered OS from Dell and format both drive and installed OS in old(original) small drive..now whenever i restart the computer from restart button it gives me a message
Primary drive 0 not found
primary drive 1 not found
Strike the F1key to continue ,F2 to run the setup utilities.
then if i press the power button manually and restart the computer it goes fine.
Plz help
Sorry for bad english:-D

 

Are these hard drives (both old and new) IDE -- the older type with the wide ribbon cables -- or SATA which uses much smaller data cables?

Not sure exactly what's causing your problem, but I suggest you make sure you have the drive settings in the BIOS set properly. If you need help with that post back and let us know.

In addition, if the drives are the older IDE type (that use the flat, usually gray ribbon data cables, you need to be sure that the drive jumpers are set correctly and that you have hooked the data cables up to the hard drives and DVD drive correctly. The two hard drives should be connected to the same ribbon data cable. Whichever drive is the boot drive should have the jumper set to "Master" (there's usually a diagram on the drive that shows how to set the jumper for Master, Slave, or Cable Select) and the end of the data cable that isn't plugged into the motherboard should be plugged into the boot/Master drive. The second plug on the same data cable (that plug is the one that's 5 or 6 inches from the end of the cable that's plugged into the Master) should be plugged into your second (non-boot) drive which should have its jumper set to "Slave". Your DVD or CD drive(s) should be plugged into another connector on the motherboard and either one can be set as the Master (but that one should be connected to the end of the data cable) and the other set to Slave and connected to the plug that's a few inches up from the end of the cable.

What you should not do is have a DVD or CD drive plugged into the same cable as a hard drive unless you are careful to set the hard drive jumper to Master and the DVD/CD drive to Slave. And make sure that any hard drive connected to the end of an IDE data cable is set to Master while any other drive plugged into the second connector has its jumper set to Slave.

Alternatively, if all your drives, both hard drives and DVD/CD drives have a "Cable Select" jumper setting you can set all the drives to Cable Select and I think that should work fine as long as the hard drives are plugged into the ends of the data cables or both hard drives are connected to the same cable with the boot drive at the end of the cable.

If you've already hooked up your drives properly as described and checked your BIOS settings or if some or all of the drives in question are SATA drives then post back and tell us that and maybe someone else will have some suggestions.

Good luck.

 

Thanks for your reply Eezak,
i took out all the hard drive and IDE cable ..then check a jumper as you mentions...follow the procedure ..recheck the cable..and it works
Thanks for your help...seems like i made a wrong jumper settings.
Thanks once again for your help

 

Glad to be of help.