Primary Hard drive 1 not found

Hi,

I have a Dell GX150. The hard drive failed and I am replacing it with a hard drive I know works. I took it out of my Compaq this morning. When I look in bios the drive is listed as 0 and it won't boot up. What am I doing wrong? It is a western digital hard drive and the jumpers are set at the end pins on the right by the power cord. How can I change it from the 0 drive to the 1 drive? My bios is A6 if I need to update the bios how can I do that when I can't get past the primary hard drive not found screen?
The old hard drive was running XP. The new drive is running XP.
Thanks

 

Since you have a Dell I would look at the diagram on the HD and put the jumper to Cable Select. That should get the drive recognized assuming we aren't also dealing with a drive too large for your BIOS to see. Anyway try the jumper first.

If the replacement drive already has Windows installed on it you won't be able to get into Windows without doing some sort of repair, reformat etc. I imagine you just have recovery XP discs?

 

Thanks. The jumper is on cable select and the drive is seen in bios as 0. I am getting drive 1 not found. I went into bios and turned the 0 drive to the off position and the 1 drive to automatic and rebooted and got device not found. I've got tons of disks.

Thanks again.

 

The boot drive should be 0 but it also has to have a fresh install of XP, not hardware from another system install. Check in the bios to see that the 0 drive is being called for to boot in boot order and if not change it. Dells have a tendency to get stuck with old patterns and you might have to reset bios to optimum defaults or even pull the cmos battery for 5 minutes to get it to reset.

 

At about 11 last night I decided I didn't care if the hard drive was 1 or not. I installed Windows and it works. I'm still getting an F1 error or warning or whatever but the Microsoft Corporation is happy, my kid is happy and I can get some rest.

Thanks for your help!

 

If you are getting the F1 choose to enter bios and click in there anywhere save and leave and that should force reset of drive and message to go away.