Gah ! I don't know what's wrong. :(

cmscam

cmscam

cmscam

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Joined
24 Oct 2006
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108
Hello everyone.

My brother has just bought a 6 month old PC from a friend of ours, however when we bought it we knew that it was going to need a format. (not a problem)

However, when we came to format it it would get stuck on 1% and we left it for about 1 hour....

For some reason after it formatted and jumped up really fast.... It got to the installing files screen, after that when it comes to boot up it was saying "Sata primary device 0 not found" and "Sata primary device 1 not found" - Or something along those lines.

I'm not a computer genius so I went out and bought a new HDD.... Now when I come to format the new HDD (Needed formatting, didn't come formatted for some reason) it formatted fine..... And it installed files fine, but when it came to boot I get the same error message again....

I believe all the jumper settings are right but like I say I'm not a genius. :(

Here is what my Bios says :

Sata Primary Drive : Unknown Drive
Sata secondry drive : Unknown drive
Primary master drive : Hard Drive
Primary slave drive : Unknown drive
Secondy master drive : cd rom
secondy slave drive : unknown drive

Thanks in advance. :)
 
you may need to get hold off sata drivers for the motherboard on a floppy drive. and then when it asks do yo uwant to load any other drivers or something press f6 and follow from there.

this is very common with sata drives on the previous generations of motherboars. just had to do thatmyself
 
rpstewart said:
OK, couple of questions to start with:

1) What interface is the new HDD, IDE or SATA?

2) What's the boot priority list set to in the BIOS?
Click to expand...

IDE I think . :confused:

The boot priority is set to the hard drive
 
Hello guys.

I've just found out that my brother is getting boot now.... The thing is, it still gives him the device not found and it says press F1 to continue to boot.... He'll press F1 and it will boot fine...

All's I need to do now is to get rid of the annoying error message.

Thanks.

EDIT : The error message is primary drive 1 not found and secondy drive 2 not found.
 
Last edited:
Hey guys !!

Fixed again now ! I'm soo happy ! :D

Alls it was was a simple command I had to do in the bios... Here is the instructions I followed :

"Dell systems work better on Cable select. Try setting it like that, with the master drive on the black connector, and the slave drive on the grey connector. It should work out like that. After you've done that, go into your BIOS, and light up the NumLock, CapsLock, and ScrollLock lights on your keyboard. Hold <Alt>+F, then hit <Alt>+E. After it stops beeping, hit <Alt>+B, and this will restart your system. That procedure sets your BIOS back to defaults, and it should force the system to redetect all of the IDE drives."

Thanks !! :D
 
cmscam said:
"Dell systems work better on Cable select. Try setting it like that, with the master drive on the black connector, and the slave drive on the grey connector. It should work out like that. After you've done that, go into your BIOS, and light up the NumLock, CapsLock, and ScrollLock lights on your keyboard. Hold <Alt>+F, then hit <Alt>+E. After it stops beeping, hit <Alt>+B, and this will restart your system. That procedure sets your BIOS back to defaults, and it should force the system to redetect all of the IDE drives."
Click to expand...

That's stunning! The Sonic The Hedgehog approach to BIOSes.... :p

I definitely prefer your standard Award/Pheonix BIOS method of setting each port to auto detect a) by default and b) with a simple BIOS menu option.
 
cmscam said:
Now when I come to format the new HDD (Needed formatting, didn't come formatted for some reason) it formatted fine.
Click to expand...
I see you've got it working so please consider this as education. :)
HHDs can't come formatted as the manufacturers don't know what operating system you're going to use them with. There are at least three versions of NTFS plus FAT32 and possibly FAT16. That's just for Windows, you might be putting the drive into a Mac or a NAS box, running Linux or Unix, all of which have their own disk formats. And that's ignoring that you might not want the drive as one large partition.

Jonathan]
 
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