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Primary drive 0 not found, strike the F1 key to continue

Apr 11, 2005 6:25AM PDT

Hi,

I have a Dell Dimension 4600 purchaed 1 1/2 years ago. About 2-3 weeks ago, I installsed a 200 GB Maxtor 7200 ATA 133 in the machine in addition to the 40GB original drive.

A week later, the system acted funny by making a sound (HD) and giving me the follwoing message:

Primary drive 0 not found, strike the F1 key to continue, F2 key to run the setup utility. The following morning the system worked fine. A couple of days ago it came up with the message but it did not work in the morning. I moved the controller wires around but no luck.

Any idea how I can get my machine working? At this time I will be happy with having access to my original drive!! Thanks
Tinman6g

Discussion is locked

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Serial ATA - F2 to continue
Apr 24, 2005 4:35PM PDT

I am also a Dell Owner and recently installed an IDE in addition to my Serial ATA. I began receiving a similar error but only after powering off the machine. A restart would go cleanly so it appeared sporadic. You will probably be able to duplicate this after a complete shutdown.

Anyway, I will make a couple assumptions.

1) You are installing a Serial ATA in addition to your Primary IDE Hard Drive.

Here is how I believe I resolved my issue.

Go into Bios - Press F2 for setup.
Serial ATA will probably say say Yes - Press the Space Bar and turn it Off.
You should see the Bios request status for two ATA drives. Under your Serial ATA Drive 1 - set it to Auto ( so that it will autodetect on bootup.)

After rebooting, you should get a message 'new hardware found'
Shutdown and reboot the system. Your F1/F2 to continue error should go away because you are forcing your system to recognize the hard drive in question and not confuse it with other.

If this still doesn't work, a slightly riskier steup would be to set your Primary IDE Drive in Bios to Auto and make sure all Other IDE Drives (Primary/Secondary) are set to OFF.

Here is a link from Western Digital to look at for checking your jumper settings on your primary IDE drive.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_alp.php?p_cv=1.123%3B2.u0&p_pv=&p_prods=0&p_cats=123&p_hidden_prods=&prod_lvl1=0&cat_lvl1=123&p_search_text=jumper+settings&p_new_search=1&p_search_type=answers.search_fnl


Best Wishes on resolving this. I hope I helped a little.

Michael

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Maxtors
Apr 24, 2005 10:37PM PDT

I had this problem.

My research leads me to believe it is a common problem take a look at this link:

http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/maxtor-hard-disk-recovery.htm

I rang these guys and they told me it is normally one of 2 things, if it is clicking or making a 'musical' tone it is mechanical fault, if it is quiet then it is most likely a firmware fault. No cheap way of fixing them unfortunately!! I don't know what firmware is exctly in relation to a hard disk drive but there you go! Happy