No IDE Hard Drive Works.

Pell

Pell

New Member
Hey, I have about 5 different IDE hard drive's and not 1 will come up on the Dell Dimension 5150. It detects my IDE Disc tray but not any hard drive's. I have switch connector with my hard drive and disc tray still no success and i have even replaced the cable which did not solve the problem. I have run out of ideas and need help. by the way in bios the ide hard drive boot option comes up as (not detected) but the disc tray come up as (detected) :confused:

Thanks in advanced.

Pell :confused:
 
Are they on the same IDE channel, or different channels? Is the channel enabled in the BIOS?
 
by same channel do you mean same cable? If so yes they are, i have also checked the jumpers (hard drive = master) etc. Idk how to enable it in bios? I have had xp running through this hard drive in exactly the same way. now it just won't read any hard drive?
 
If the hard drive is jumpered as master then the cdrom must be jumpered as slave. If you have 2 IDE channels on the motherboard, its always best to put the hard drive on IDE 1 and the cdrom on IDE 2.
 
by channels you mean slot on motherbaord. I do not have 2 slots for IDE well not what i can see on my dimension 5150 mobo. :/ even i just plug hard drive in without the cd rom drive it still dont come up.
 
Look in the bios, you may have to enable secondary slave. I hate dells because of this. Or you can try the drive in another system. Can you hear the drive spinning up?
 
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no such thing in this bios.... i am running out of patience with this machine. :( would like it working.... any more advice?
 
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I edited my post, didn't know if you saw it or not. Other than what I edited, I don't have anything more. You either have a bad drive or bad cable, providing the devices are jumpered correctly.

Let me ask you something. Your IDE cable has 3 connections, a single all by itself and then 2 that are near one another. Do you have the single connection attached to the motherboard and the drives attached to the others?

Try this..

Jumper both of the drives as cable select and put the hard drive on the end connector and put the cdrom on the middle connector. See if both are recognized and work.
 
I have replaced the wire and hard drive, still not fixing the issue, i will try this thing you have just said to do.
 
fixed. Had to set something like PATA 1 and PATA 2 enabled. :D thanks for all the help guys! :D
 
The best way how you can find out wether your HDD works or not is to connect it to the power supply using any valid PATA adapter and then use the data cable to connect it to the USB entrance on the computer which has fully working OS such as Windows XP.If the HDD is detected,if you can format it and use it properly then the HDD works properly.If the HDD is not detected and you cannot format it and cannot do anything with it then the HDD is not working properly.

By the way does your HDD even spin?If yes,do you hear any weird sounds from it?




Cheers!
 
Pell said:
fixed. Had to set something like PATA 1 and PATA 2 enabled. :D thanks for all the help guys! :D
Click to expand...

Figured that it had to be the setting I was talking about. Again, thats why dell sucks. Why would you need to enable/disable IDE/SATA ports?? Stupid idea.
 
In BIOS. Some computer have SATA mode such as IDE, AHCI and RAID/IDE. Not all OEM computer have RAID controller. You should keep SATA in IDE mode otherwise IDE port onboard won't work. You should check it out and see if it work or what i talk about.

That's why i like custom build computer. My motherboard have two different control of data for SATA. SATA0-4 controlled by chipset. GSATA2_5/6 and IDE controlled by Gigabyte chip.

For EX: I can have three hard drive in IDE mode by chipset and two hard drive in AHCI mode by Gigabyte SATA2.
 
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