Hi all,
In an old Dimension 2350 with Win 2000, the machine wouldn't start. It seemed to hang at the Dell Screen. With a little more prodding I managed to get the machine to go to Windows Recovery Console, but unfortunately, it was the end of the day - so I shut it down with plans to do some data retrieval in the morning. No luck. In the morning, I kept getting a 'Primary hard Drive not detected' or some error of that nature. I went back to the Recovery Console, but this time got a message that Windows couldn't recognize the hard drive.
So, I grabbed another perfectly working Dimension 2350 and tried to set the bad drive up as a slave. As far as I can see, the jumper settings are correct, the cables are secured. If i remove the slave drive (remember, this is the drive that the first pc was not recognizing), from the BIOS settings, the machine boots fine with only the master. When I set the BIOS to AUTO detect a secondary drive, the machine does not recognize either drive. That's right, I get a message that says it could not detect Primary 0 or Primary 1. I go into the BIOS and find 'Unknown' in both slots.
What about the bad drive, when BIOS is enabled to detect it, would be causing the detection of both drives to fail?
What could I be doing wrong? The good drive in the good Dimension is a Maxtor. The bad drive coming out of the other Dimension is a Western Digital.
If you can visualize this, I have the jumper set on the Maxtor to the last vertical set of pins closest to the IDE cable (it only has 9 pins, so there is actually 1 more column of pins, but only 1 pin in that column. On the Western Digital (that would be the slave) I have the jumper set in the third column, vertically. (there are five columns of pins).
Carrie