My computer has alzhiemers

My Dell dimension 4600 wont recognize any of it's 5 drives! I'm new at this but here goes. I have 2 hard drives( the 80G that came with it and a 160G i installed about a year ago thats worked fine until yesterday) two optical drive the floppy drive. I have the two hard drives on 1 channel with the 80g as master the 160 as slave, and the dvd/cd drives on the other channel. the machine stopped recognizing the optical drives about a month ago but I have an external drive so i didn't really worry about it. but yesterday on boot up I get a message "no bootable drives found press f1 to reboot or f2 to do something else I cant remember) any ideas?

 

I take this this message was displayed on the post screen, correct?

You will need to hit the F2 button which will say something like "to enter the bios". Enter the bios and check under "Advanced CMOS", that the HDDs and the optical drives are recognised.

Check this in the first instance. It may just be that all the drives are correctly registered in the bios but you will just need to check this then hit "save & exit" and reboot.

Good Luck

 

If this is a desktop machine, it could be your cmos battery is dead or dying, thus the cmos/bios is "loosing" the drive settings.