Dell hangs at BIOS load

[khan]

I'm sure you all are happy to hear about the further (mis)adventures of me and my Dell Dimension 8100. The saga continues:

As mentioned in the previous thread, I came home to a non-booting computer and strange whirring/tocking noises. Thinking I had a dead deskstar HD, I immediately backed up all of my data. One of the things that happened before I removed both hard drives (I also had a Western Digital 200gb in there) was that upon booting it would say something like "Primary disk 0 not found, Primary disk 1 not found".

After removing and backing up, and then replacing just the deskstar hd (has the OS on it), The computer will go to the BIOS loading screen, which has a little progress bar. The bar goes all the way across then stops. If I push f2 to enter setup, it says "entering setup" but then when the bar goes all the way across, it stops...I have tried switching the power molex going to the drive, but I hear the drive spin up fine (no more scary noises, thank god)

I have also tried swapping the IDE cable, no luck, but I am sure the problem is with the drive. If I remove the drive (unplug the IDE cable), the system gets past the BIOS and says

primary hard disk drive 0 not found
primary hard disk drive 1 not found

etc, etc, and lets me enter setup and see my two CD-type drives.

Anyone got any ideas?

[khan]

I am led to believe that I have a dead IDE 1 channel. Here is why:

Plugging in my "bad" drive as master/CS -->hang
plugging in my "bad" drive as slave-->"primary hard disk drive 1/0 not found", lets me enter setup, etc.

plugging in a known good (but empty) drive as master/CS -->hang
plugging it in as slave-->same error as above, can enter setup, etc.

Also, with a drive (any drive) plugged into IDE 1, it won't boot from anything else (I.e. the windows install CD I tried putting in the drive.) With no hard drives installed, it will boot from there.

Come on guys, I know someone's gotta have some ideas. Am I going to be forced to buy an IDE controller to salvage this machine?

[TheBaron]

dude I know you have a bunch of IDE controllers that came with all those WD drives. I have an extra if you need

[khan]

I will take you up on that offer, sir. I had 2, you're right...one went bad, and one is with Omar, in the wall computer.

[khan]

Update: it's working again. Here is the situation:

Recall, that after the initial hard drive fart I freaked out and pulled both drives from the system, re-inserting the "bad" deskstar only after I had backed up the contents using a USB enclosure and my laptop. Since then I had been working with only the one drive.

Looking at setup (which I have to boot with NO drives attached in order to do) I had set both Primary 0 and 1 to "Auto". I tried setting 0 to Auto and 1 to OFF. Lo and behold, it booted! I then tried setting both 1 and 0 to Auto and plugging in a second drive. It works again! So apparently "Auto" only works if there is actually a drive attached to it.

I'm glad it's working, but I am perplexed as to why it requires so much manual intervention.

[tmh88]

before you fixed it, could you even get the bios screen to load?

[khan]

I could always watch the BIOS load. My dell, at least, has a progress bar under the big dell logo. The progress bar fills up as the BIOS loads. With mine, though, it would hang once the bar was filled.

Before fixing, it would only load setup if there were
a) no drives attached at all on the primary chain
b) both drives set to "OFF" in the BIOS (loaded by creating situation A)
c) if i remember correctly, it would also let me go to BIOS if I jumpered the drive wrong (as slave and the only one on the IDE channel, for example).

[Mirkaei]

Okay, I have a semi-related problem.

I'm in a PC Repair class and I need to get a POST Beep, but that's not happening. At first I was getting the "Primary Hard Disk Drive 0 Not Found" error.. I somehow fixed that (I'm not sure how). There isn't even a hard drive connected, but I went into the BIOS setup and I must've changed everything to "None" at some point, since that error went away.

But along with that I was getting (and still am getting)..

PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable.

strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility


I tried swapping both the cable used for the CD-ROM and hard drive and the one used for the floppy.. not sure what the problem is. Any ideas?? (I know I'm going to feel dumb if the answer is obvious.. :shakehead )