BIOS Problems With Dell Dimension 8250

[Minimoke]

Hey everyone,
I've decided to crack the ol' Dell open and upgrade her a bit, so my little Siblings aren't hogging mine all the time

I've bought a new hard drive for it, as the old one made a rather loud whine it is over 7 years old, give it a break!]

You'd think putting the new hard drive in would be easy, right? Not quite.

It doesn't see any hard drives in the BIOS, Windows Setup doesn't see any either, I just can't get this bloody machine to see the hard drives! I've put the original back, tried different IDE ports, the lot, and still nothing. It says this:

Diskette drive 0 seek failure

It says this regardless of whether there is a drive in the machine. I'm going to start looking for a BIOS update, I've got some floppy's somewhere, but if that doesn't work, I'm out of ideas. It's got: Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS version 1.10 A04

Thanks in advance for any wisdom you may have. Cheers. Chris.

 

[ThundyCat]

Bios update would be a start mate.

 

[bremen1874]

Diskette drive 0 seek failure

It looks like there's a problem with the floppy drive.

 

[Minimoke]

Ah, I didn't think of that Bremen. I'll check if that's all plugged in. But yes, I'll have a good look for the latest BIOS [if I can find it!] Cheers, Chris.

 

[Minimoke]

Reseated the floppy cable and it booted up I still get an error though. I'll see if the BIOS update fixes that. Cheers, Chris.

 

[J.B]

Have you set the jumpers on the new hard drive properly?

 

[Mattus]

BIOS update is a good start.

How big is the new HD? If it's big and the BIOS is really old, it might need a bit of persuasion to recognise it.