recognizing hard drive

[alighieri]

I currently have a dell 8100 and I am trying to remove the internal zip drive. However, whenever I disconnect the zip drive from the ide cable and power supply the system will not start, I get to the bios and no where else. My initial thought was that this was a jumper issue, but the same happens when the drive is selected as the master or as cable select (this is with the drive in the distal port of the ide cable). when I place the hard drive in the proximal port of the ide drive, the system will post but will not recognize that there is a hard drive attached. I am not really sure where to go from here. Any suggestions would be helpful, or if you need more info I will be happy to oblige.

note, system has floppy on floppy cable, and a DVD, CD-RW on the second ide cable.

Alighieri


edit: the hard drive is an IBM 60gb deskstar and I tried the 16 logical head and 15 logical head settings for the jumper settings. (by the way, what is the difference and when do you use 16 vs 15??)

 

[dszd0g]

Does the BIOS not have an Auto detect IDE device setting?

Make sure the hard drive is on the end of the IDE cable and is set to master. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "proximal" or "distal." I am guessing that those are attempts at translation, so I appologize for not understanding what you mean. If you could use the terms "middle connector" and "end connector", I will be able to follow you.

Proximal means nearest to, but it is ambiguous as to whether you mean nearest to the motherboard or nearest to the end of the cable. Distal means farthest from, again with the ambiguity. Neather word is in common usage. I would assume that distal would be the "end connector" and proximal would be the "middle connector."

Yes there is a difference between the 16 and 15 logical heads, but basically it just has to match what is in the BIOS. Some BIOSes will not detect the correct size with logical heads set to 16. Default is 16 heads, and if it worked with one setting originally I would use that setting. Did you write down the original BIOS settings for the hard drive when it was working? If you plug back in the zip drive does it work again?

 

[alighieri]

ah sorry about the usage of proximal and distal. Yes, distal meant the end connector and the proximal meant the middle connector. None of the BIOS settings were changed when I attempted to do this. Yes, all goes back to normal if I reattach the zip to the middle ide connector. I am unsure if there is an autodetect ide setting, i will check on that.

Thanks,
Alighieri

side note, the hard drive and zip are on ide channel 1 and the cdrw and DVD are on ide2.

 

[dszd0g]

Make sure the hard drive's jumpers are set to master (you already have it on the end of the cable). From their it should be just making sure that things are configured correctly in the BIOS. When the machine does not boot do you hear the hard drive spin up?

When you unplug the Zip drive, do you disable it in the BIOS?

What error do you get booting?