BleepingComputer.com: Replaced a secondary hard drive and cannot get past setup screen

Hello All,

I have a Dell XPS400 Windows xp. I have 3 hard drives. I replaced 1 hard drive for a 1tb hard drive (not the master) and it worked for a while and but now with the new drive attached it will not get pass the setup screen at powering up and the drive does not appear. If I unplug that drive it starts normally and i see the other two drives. It clearly does not like that drive for some reason but was working fine.

I have tried to move the pin to slow down the tranfer rate etc but did not help and I even tried moving the sata cables and drive positions to various locations but as long as that drive is connected the computer will not get pass the setup bios screen. I don't know what else to try. It has power and the cables are working and am pretty sure the drive is fine (brand new).

Is there a motherboard limitation for the size of the drive or something else I am missing. Could I possibly disconnect one of the dvd drives and attached it to the ide cable with adapter? I am at a total loss. I would like to retrieve the data.

Everytime I move an internal drive to an external enclosure it always wants me to reformat which of course means you lose your data.

Thanks for any ideas or help. I am puling my hair out here.

Hi .

Where/how is the troubled drive...attached? You mention USB enclosures...is the drive directly attached to the motherboard or is it in a USB enclosure?

Is the troubled drive a SATA drive...or an IDE drive?

Is XP up to date with critical updates? Is SP2 installed? Is SP3 installed?

<<Everytime I move an internal drive to an external enclosure it always wants me to reformat which of course means you lose your data.>>

Can you explain this? I've moved drives to USB enclosures and never received a request to reformat...I've also moved drives from USB enclosures to direct connection to the motherboard...and never had to reformat.

How many SATA connections are on the motherboard? Are all of these drives SATA drives? Never mind, I found the answer at http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/syst...v.htm#wp1053345

Louis

My guess right now...would be that you have your BIOS settings wrong...or your connections wrong.

Any SATA drives installed ought to be properly recognized...but the boot drive should (IMO) be at the SATA0 connector. The other two can go anywhere.

Your motherboard should have small writing beside the connectors which indicate which is which, I believe.

Louis

hamluis, on Nov 11 2008, 11:14 AM, said:

I guess I should have provided more info. I have XP media addition with SP2 installed. The drive is a sata drive plugged directly into the mother board on SATA connector 3 or 4. When I start the computer with this drive plugged directly into the mother board it starts up with the windows xp screen and sits there for about 2 min and then goes to the blue setup screen. It says that SATA0 and SATA2 drives not found. But if I unplug this new drive it boots normally finding SATA0 and SATA3 or whatever order they are in. I have moved this new drive to all positions SATA0, 1, 2 etc and even left it plugged in by itself and the bios screen does not see this drive at all. I suppose it could be a bad drive but how could you tell without it showing up to run a diagnostics or anything.

I tried moving the internal drive that I replace my new drive that doesn't work to a usb recently and it told me I needed to reformat. Of course I may have caused the problem by confusing disk manager. I put the 1tb drive in the place of the old drive and tried to clone the disk and then replaced the old drive back and I think disk manager was looking for the 1tb drive and may have hit the wrong key. This has been so frustrating. The only other thing I did was install a pci usb card but I can't see how that would effect this new drive. Anyway not sure if this helps with any other suggestions but thanks again for trying.

Louis is there a way to reset the bios to detect hardware from the setup screen?

<<Louis is there a way to reset the bios to detect hardware from the setup screen?>>

There is no uniform way in which a BIOS is set up.

Every BIOS that I had ever seen either automatically detected every drive change...or provided manual instructions in the BIOS on how to force a manual redetection when drives were changed. Look in the lower right portion of the screen when you access your BIOS.

That 1TB drive should not be expected to boot from the SATA0 slot...unless you changed your boot options in the BIOS. And even then...it cannot boot because it does not have Windows installed and the necessary files are missing.

As far as how to tell if a drive is bad, that's easy if it's a SATA drive (no jumpers to make things complicated).

If each other drive can be properly detected in the BIOS...at each of your 4 SATA motherboard connectors...then the drive which cannot be detected is bad. Pretty simple to me.

Note that the system won't boot with each drive at a SATA connection, but each should be detected in the BIOS if it's functioning properly.

So...I would try each drive...one at a time (to eliminate confusion/interference) at each motherboard slot..then reboot and go back into the BIOS. If that drive is reflected properly on the main drive screen, it is (probably) not bad. OTOH, if the drive doesn't reflect properly...and it's the only drive which failed the test for that connection...it's the drive.

No diagnostic is needed for this preliminary test.

Forget about USB enclosures and drives for the moment .

Louis

hamluis, on Nov 11 2008, 02:43 PM, said:

So if it fails this test and I feel sure it will, is all lost? I just finished tranferring everything to this nice new fat drive and I would hate to think that I have now conviently lost everything all at once. Do you think I may still be able to recover using an external drive? I will start here but will probably have to wait until the weekend to rip the computer apart again.

Thanks again.

Well...if you've lost data...you've lost data.

But there's little point in worrying about that until you have conducted the test of the SATA connections on the motherboard.

Let's try to define the problem...before scrambling for solutions to something else.

Louis