Computer Hope
Hardware => Hardware => Topic started by: Arcano on June 04, 2007, 02:08:27 PM
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This question concerns my Dell Dimension 8300 desktop.
I was playing a CPU- and memory-intensive game recently when it froze up entirely, with alt+tab and ctrl+alt+del not working at all. This actually happens a lot with this particular game--no big deal AFAIC. I held down my power button to force a shutdown (my only option), waited a minute, then turned it back on. The BIOS booted fine, but then I got an error screen stating (paraphrase here):
BIOS cannot find Primary Hard Drive 0. BIOS cannot find Primary Hard Drive 1. Press F1 to continue or F2 to enter BIOS.
F1 did nothing, so I entered the BIOS, and switched my Primary Master and Slave hard drives from "Auto" to "Off," and back again: nothing. BIOS did detect my Secondary HDD and the DVD+R I have slaved to it just fine, but of course I couldn't boot with my XP drive inoperational.
I shut the computer back down, checked all the cable connections, then turned it on again, to the same problem. I shut it down again, waited 25 mintues, and turned it back on, and now everything is working fine.
Obviously an answer isn't urgent since my computer is up and running, but I'd like to know what's going on so this doesn't happen again. I've got a sneaking suspicion that it's a power supply issue (it's just a 305W), but the fact that my secondary ATA/IDE devices weren't affected makes me pretty uncertain. That and the fact that I honestly don't know much about computers.
Anyone have any ideas?
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My dad had a similar problem on his computer once. It would not detect his HD, and so he pluged in the slave drive's power plug (he didn't have a slave drive), and it worked fine.
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The PSU could indeed be the culprit here...post more specs on the machine hardware OS how much RAM, what game etc. and we can advise further
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My dad had a similar problem on his computer once. It would not detect his HD, and so he pluged in the slave drive's power plug (he didn't have a slave drive), and it worked fine.
Plugged it into what?
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My dad had a similar problem on his computer once. It would not detect his HD, and so he pluged in the slave drive's power plug (he didn't have a slave drive), and it worked fine.
Plugged it into what?
The hard drive.