[Makal]

So, here I am setting up one of the two Dell Precision 420's that I ordered to play World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, when I boot it up, I got the "Primary Hard Drive 0 Not Found" "Press F1 to continue or F2 to enter Setup" message.

I went through the forum and noticed that Ditto posted almost the same problem, I think his issue was solved by a new Hard Drive.

But here is where it gets weird - the computer will boot up, and I even was able to install WIN XP on the computer. It will run - but not nearly at the speeds you would expect a (1 GHZ, 256 MB RAM) machine like this with no data on it to run.

I have tried Re-Seating the Hard Drive once before, and will attempt it again while waiting for any sort of replies from the forum. Let me know what you guys think.

[Advertisements]

Welcome to GTG Makal. Ditto's trouble was with a Dell laptop, but similar. I would try reseating the IDE ribbon cable, or replacing it. If that doesn't work, try resetting the BIOS using the onboard jumper, or by removing the battery for at least five minutes. Finally, I would check to see if a BIOS update is a available.

[admin]

Welcome to GTG Makal. Ditto's trouble was with a Dell laptop, but similar. I would try reseating the IDE ribbon cable, or replacing it. If that doesn't work, try resetting the BIOS using the onboard jumper, or by removing the battery for at least five minutes. Finally, I would check to see if a BIOS update is a available.

[Makal]

I am going to try the IDE cable, but just to be clear, what battery are you referring to?

[Makal]

Small Edit:

I jsut found out that the HD is SCSI rather than IDE. I am thinking the computer is not recognizing it as the primary, because it is looking for a standard IDE HD. Is there any way I can tell BIOS to simply focus in on the SCSI HD and ignore the fact that there is no IDE connection?

[Makal]

Heh, I figure out more and more as I go. I got rid of the error message, now I am just having problems with extreme computer slowness. I think I might be able to fix that with the XP repair CD or something.

Thanks for the help.

[admin]

Have you accessed the BIOS, and tried restoring to default settings?

[Makal]

Well...
After a bit of googling here is what I managed to figure out:

1) Go into BIOS and tell the computer to ignore the IDE connections for a Hard Drive. (Set it from Auto to off)
2) Go into your SCSI controller and configure your SCSI Hard Drive, making sure that all the port setting are matching up.
3) Configure the boot order of your drives - I went with SCSI: C:, followed by my floppy and then CD drive.... just my personal preference.

Anyway, posting my ideas here, and getting your help let me work through the problem. Thanks a ton!

[admin]

Looks like you're on the right track.