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

[cmscam]

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.

 

[cmscam]

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?

IDE I think .

The boot priority is set to the hard drive

 

[cmscam]

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.

 

[cmscam]

Hey guys !!

Fixed again now ! I'm soo happy !

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 !!