Problem with Dell computer not finding hard drive

[Sandan]

My daughter has a dell gx260 computer which was given to her. It is a pentium 4 2.4 system. I upgraded the harddrive and got a message that the system can't find the harddrive. I needed to clear the bios in order for it to be recognized. All seemed well for about 5 days. Then just last night my daughter booted up and got the message that the system can't find the hard drive. Nothing inside the computer was touched. I can clear the bios again but just wanted to know if anyone else has ran into this with a Dell and if they found a permanent fix. Thanks.

 

[mcurphy]

Originally posted by: Sandan
My daughter has a dell gx260 computer which was given to her. It is a pentium 4 2.4 system. I upgraded the harddrive and got a message that the system can't find the harddrive. I needed to clear the bios in order for it to be recognized. All seemed well for about 5 days. Then just last night my daughter booted up and got the message that the system can't find the hard drive. Nothing inside the computer was touched. I can clear the bios again but just wanted to know if anyone else has ran into this with a Dell and if they found a permanent fix. Thanks.

Do you have another system you can drop the hdd into to verify that it isn't the cause of the error?

 

[Sandan]

Well, I do but it has XP installed which is tied to the Dell. My other system wouldn't boot with that drive. I did a disk check and nothing appears to be wrong. Thanks for the thought.

 

[mcurphy]

Originally posted by: Sandan
Well, I do but it has XP installed which is tied to the Dell. My other system wouldn't boot with that drive. I did a disk check and nothing appears to be wrong. Thanks for the thought.

I was thinking you might place it as a slave drive and see if it even shows up as an additional hdd in the other system. You wouldn't have to try and boot off of it in the other system.

If you could do that and restart the PC a few times, see if it shows up each time, then you could either eliminate the hdd as the source of the problem, or find out that it is in fact the hdd. It may be an intermittent error in the hdd which is causing it not to be recognized at all / on occasion.

 

[Sandan]

Thanks I'll give it a try.

 

[KGB]

Dell PCs like to use the "Cable Select" jumper setting instead of "Master" or "Slave".

How is your new HDD jumpered?

 

[Sandan]

KGBMAN...Great I will try that. The system is working again. I found info on Dell's site on how to reset the Bios within the bios menu by pressing (Alt) (D) which starts the hard drive auto configuration process. I will try the cable select thing and hopefully the system won't go back to not finding the drive in the future.