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General discussion

Hardware Upgrades gone wrong?

Dec 2, 2003 4:29AM PST

I have a Dell Dimension L600r with a PIII 600 Mhz processor. I recently upgraded the ram from 64 Mb to 256 Mb. I also removed the 4Gb hard drive and installed a Western Digital 80Gb hard drive. After performing these hardware upgrades I then flashed the bios from A03 to A14 becuase the original A03 bios wouldn't auto detect my new hard drive. After I flashed the bios there was no longer an issue with detecting the hard drive. I then proceed to load Win XP Pro with SP1a. I performed the OS install with no problems. The new drive is set to primary master with the bios detecting it correctly. I then have none selected as slave primary in the bios, and secondary ide master set to the cdrom, and again none selected as the secondary slave. I also have quick boot selected in the bios, with quiet boot disabled.

The problem arises after the computer is shut down for any significant amount time (greater then a couple of minutes) and when I go to power the system back up, my computer fails to boot from the hard drive. It instead wants to boot from the floppy disk. If I press cntrl-altl-delete when the prompt to insert a bootable floppy disk comes up, the computer reboots and finds the hard drive, and then continues to boot into Win XP just fine.

I wanted to see how the system reacted when I installed the old 4Gb hard drive with WIN98 on it. After I reinstalled the old hard drive, the computer would boot perfect everytime.

So do I have a problem with my bios not detecting my hard drive? If so, why does it not find the hard drive on the first boot, but is able to find it on the immediate reboot?

Discussion is locked

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(NT) Use the 80 conductor IDE cable. Drives set to Cable Select. Same?
Dec 2, 2003 4:58AM PST

.

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Re:(NT) Use the 80 conductor IDE cable. Drives set to Cable Select. Same?
Dec 2, 2003 5:17AM PST

I used the IDE cable that came with the new drive with the jumper on the drive set to master. A "IT" buddy of mine made the suggestion that the drive might not be ready by the time the bios is trying to detect it, and that a delay is needed. But since my bios doesn't give me the capability of setting a delay he suggested to disable the quick boot function which should give me enough of a delay for the drive to spin up in time. Does this sound like a possibility?

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Your choice.
Dec 2, 2003 5:37AM PST

But did you use an 80 conductor IDE cable and the drives set to Cable Select?

Or is this an option you are not going to explore?

Bob

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Re: Dell L600r Dumping physical memory
Nov 17, 2004 3:55AM PST

I'm having difficulty after upgrading a perfectly fine working Dell L600r from Win98SE to Win 2000 Pro, after completion of the upgrade, the PC which had went very smoothly the machine started dumping physical memory, the system had 64MB RAM which came with the machine,and another 256 DRAM 133 which did'nt register. At this point I'd just like to get the machine running even if I have to reformat the HD and start from scratch.

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Add as a 2nd HD
Feb 25, 2008 12:30AM PST

Is it possible to add your new HD as a second HD. Is there a slot for that?

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After 3 years it's doubtful they will be replying.
Feb 25, 2008 1:25AM PST

Be careful about adding questions when the posts are this old.