[slander]

Hello everyone. I'm new to the forums, and this place was highly suggested, so I thought it couldn't hurt to ask for some help.

I'm having a problem with an old, but until recent, trusty 'ol Dell Dimension 8200. The original hard drive failed 3 years ago, so I pulled the original 40 gig and the 80 gig storage drive (which wasn't being used) and put them away. Somehow I convinced myself the 80 gig trashed as well, otherwise I would have used it from the beginning. So I dropped a single 20 gig Seagate drive, fired it up, and installed GNU/Linux. Worked just fine for the last 3 years. Yesterday I decided to see if I couldn't recover any data off the 40 and 80 gig drives. So, I find out the 80 gig is live and working. Cool! So I get all my original data off that drive, install GNU/Linux, transfer all my data off the 20 gig Seagate and I'm off and running. Worked fine all day, several shutdown/reboot cycles as well. Then I wanted to try one last time getting the data from the original 40 gig, to no luck. I gave up, slid the 80 gig with a fresh bake of GNU/Linux into the drive bay, connected the cables, and fired it up. "Failed to boot" -- Awesome. I tried and tried to fix the issue to no luck. I tried the other known-good 20 gig hard drive, same error. Tried a third known-good hard drive (from my laptop, with an adapter), same error.

All of the hard drives are recognized in the BIOS, and shows the proper size of the drive as well. But that is as far as it gets.

Could anyone help me with this with any suggestions on where or what I should be doing next?

Thanks in advance!

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Welcome to G2G

Firstly, can you go into the bios and make sure that the hard drive is at the top of the boot priority list. If not, then make it the first boot device and try again.

If this isn't the problem, then try the following:

1. Disconnect the ribbon cable that the hard drive is on and remove it from the system completely.

2. Disconnect the CD/DVD rom drive.

3. Connect one of the known good hard drives to the cable that the CD/DVD drive was using (I'm assuming that the CD/DVD was on a separate cable to the HDD). Leave this ribbon cable connected to the second IDE port on the motherboard.

So what you should have now is a single hard drive connected to different IDE port using a different ribbon cable.

Boot the system up again & make sure the HDD is recognised in the bios & is in the boot priority list, then try to boot from it.
Let me know what happens

Samm

[Samm]

Welcome to G2G

Firstly, can you go into the bios and make sure that the hard drive is at the top of the boot priority list. If not, then make it the first boot device and try again.

If this isn't the problem, then try the following:

1. Disconnect the ribbon cable that the hard drive is on and remove it from the system completely.

2. Disconnect the CD/DVD rom drive.

3. Connect one of the known good hard drives to the cable that the CD/DVD drive was using (I'm assuming that the CD/DVD was on a separate cable to the HDD). Leave this ribbon cable connected to the second IDE port on the motherboard.

So what you should have now is a single hard drive connected to different IDE port using a different ribbon cable.

Boot the system up again & make sure the HDD is recognised in the bios & is in the boot priority list, then try to boot from it.
Let me know what happens

Samm

[slander]

I fixed it yesterday, but you did hit it right on the button. It was a bad cable. Thanks though!

[Samm]

Glad to hear it! Thanks for letting us know