primary hard drive 0 not found

rjt76043

I think the Dell Dimension 8100 (P4-1.5Ghz) machine may have been hit by lightning. Don't know.

When I try to boot it, I get
primary hard drive 0 not found
primary hard drive 1 not found

I took the drives out and put them in another machine. One was trashed and the other seemed OK so I formatted it and put it back in the Dell.

This time, it just hangs during the system test and will not let me even hit F2 to get into the bios setup.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thrax

Probably because the second drive is jumpered as a slave and you've put it in the master position on the chain.

Rejumper it as a master, or assure that it's on master, and then try booting once more. Improper master/slave jumpering can freeze boot sequences.

rjt76043

I tried jumpering it both ways. When jumpered as the master (which would be correct) and located at the end of the ribbon cable, it freezes the bios. When jumpered as the slave and located on the end of the cable, it gives me the primary..... messages. :-(

Leonardo

Have you tried cable select? Have you tried detecting as master, by itself, in the computer?

Straight_Man

rjt76043 wrote:

I think the Dell Dimension 8100 (P4-1.5Ghz) machine may have been hit by lightning. Don't know.

When I try to boot it, I get
primary hard drive 0 not found
primary hard drive 1 not found

I took the drives out and put them in another machine. One was trashed and the other seemed OK so I formatted it and put it back in the Dell.

This time, it just hangs during the system test and will not let me even hit F2 to get into the bios setup.

Anyone have any ideas?

Ok, reset the CMOS. Then let it hunt and test as it boots. IF in fact it still will not let you into the BIOS, pull modem and or Network Interface card, then reset CMOS again. If still not, motherboard and\or PSU and\or RAM and\or video card is bad, for PSU get it from Dell-- do NOT try to use a generic PSU with a Dell motherboard. YOU WILL damage major things trying that.

If you have a seperate modem, video card, DVD, etc, those can be salvaged. adn should carry over. PSU and motherboard have been custom with Dell for a long time, and tied together when machine was designed. Amost anything else can be considered a carry-over FRU for purposes of a machine salvage, and can be tested one by one in anohter box. Dell uses mostly Kingston RAM, it can be used in other computers, too.

In YOUR case, replace the cabling for IDE also, bad cable can result in bad HD and bad cable with damage in right place can cause a POST-Time
IDE bus hang.

rjt76043

OK... I just pulled the master drive from another computer and put it in this one. Of course the configurations were entirely different but it worked to some degree. Looks like there is something wrong with that other drive as well. Not too surprised it is old. Am off to buy a new drive and will go from there. Thanks Thrax.. I appreciate your help. Kind regards...and since I see you are from the UK.. Cheers

Leonardo

Thanks Thrax.. I appreciate your help. Kind regards...and since I see you are from the UK..

Are you kidding? Mr. R. Thrax is from Gotham City (serious music crescendos in the background as the dust ceiling plaster falls to the floor).

rjt76043

Thanks to you all. The machine is up and running now... with a new 40GB MaxStor disk drive. Everything is looking good at this point. I will go back and tinker with the other "good" drive and see if I can get it working as a slave. I notice several of you are Folding members. I have 10 machines running Cancer Research (www.grid.org). I have 12 years of CPU time in so far. Kind Regards and thanks for your help. This is a good group!

Thrax

Being from the UK would be excellent; not only would I dazzle the ladies with a fine accent, I could travel in the company of Bothered and Dan.

But no, I'm from the suburbs of Detroit.

Though, as in Dan's fashion I've picked up a bit of his slang and made regular use of it in my own way.

Therefore, cheers mate.