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Secondary hard drive 0 not found

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5 replies

by jsarinana

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Running Windows 2000 SP3 on a Dell Workstation 220
This started just recently. It's running two drives and is giving me the following error at boot:
"Secondary Hard Drive 0 not found hit F1 or F2"
When I go into the Bios, Drive 0 is marked as "Unknown device" while my Primary is set to Auto and shows the size. any suggestions where to start. When it finish booting into Windows 2000 the second drive shows up fine and when I scan it now errors shows up and defrag looks good.

Maybe unplug second drive to see if that is what is having problems with ?

5 replies

by gigelul

Hi,
I'm not sure that I understand your issue.
About IDE and BIOS:
-you have two IDE interface which both support two drives. So, you can connect 4 drives on IDE controller.
From your description I understand that you have 2 HDDs (and CD-ROM?).Generaly the devices on IDE must be connected as follow:
-On primary IDE first device: HDD with the OS.
-On primary IDE second device: second HDD if exist.
-On secondary IDE first device: CD-ROM
-On secondary IDE second device: etc.
But the easy way if the jumpers at these devices are correct seated, is to put AutoDetect at all IDE options in BIOS.

by cavedweller

"Secondary Hard Drive 0" refers to the master device on your second IDE interface. Usually this is your CDrom.

You can always try resetting the BIOS to the default parameters, making sure that all the drives are set to auto.

It sounds like a dead drive but usually if the BIOS doesn't see the drive windows won't either.

Check your cables. Perhaps they weren't replaced correctly last time the machine was serviced.

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