Hi There - Is there anyone out there can can stop me pulling out the remainder of my hair. I have a Dell Dimension 2400 desktop PC with Windows XP Hone installed. Somehow one of my lovely children got a virus on it which slowed the whole thing down. I decided to completely wipe the harddrive for a fresh install so I put the drive into a another PC and got rid of absolutely everything, reformatting the drive in the process. When I put the HD back into my Dell and start up It says that there are no harddrives installed. I have changed cables and messed about with the bios for three days and nothing seems to work. THe harddrive is OK as it shows up as a slave on the other PC. I found a website that suggest that drivers need to be sent to the hard via floppy for it to be able to be used as a boot disk and I have looked absolutely everywhere for these to no avail. Dell don't seem to have them, nor do any of the various driver sites. The motherboard says its a Blueford with an Intel Ultra Pentium 4 processor. Absolutely any info on how to solve this probelm would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks



Skythecat

I'm guessing the problem is with SATA drivers? That certainly sounds like the case, so this should be the right driver for your computer. There are instructions at the bottom of the page that explain how to install them in conjunction with your XP install disc. Short of doing that, you could also disable SATA in your system's BIOS settings, but you would sacrifice performance by doing so.

Post back if the drivers I gave did/didn't work. I don't personally deal with Dell very often, but those appear to be the right version for you.

Edit: Apparently I fail at using URL tags...

This post has been edited by ThPenguinsRComin: Apr 2 2007, 06:09 AM

when you put the drive in the other computer you had to set the jumper to slave...did you set it back to master..?

What type of interface does the drive have?

No luck as yet with the drivers. The hard drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200 (80gb). The Motherboard says Bluford on it with an intel Ultra celeron Processor with integrated sound. video and NIC. Dimension 2400 2.4Ghz. The harddrive works on a IDE (those 80 wire cables - PATA I believe) as a primary boot. The jumper is set at MASTER (although I have tried it at CABLE SELECT). There seems to be loads of drivers out there but it would be nice to know if I am looking for a motherboard driver, hard drive driver etc. The system runs under Windows XP home edition. Hope this helps.

I would check all the connections again...
no joy ...then try cable select....
no joy...try another cable..