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BluesFan

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I have searched the archives but didn't find what I was looking for.
A friend gave me a Dell with out a hard drive or cd rom drive.
I have tried several hard drives and one cd drive.
It won't load any hard drives. It also tells me that there is no cd drive.

Does anyone know what to do?
 
So its loaded with windows and when you put a cd in, it apears as if it doesn't? is that right? Sorry im confused lol
 
They are both IDE.
It doesn't tell me there is no cd drive installed. I went into set up and noticed it there.
I did get one hard drive to load in safe mode only but that is it.

What else do you need to know. I will try to answer.
 
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Try plugging one in at a time.

Do you know what Jumpers are? (Technically called Shunts)

If you have jumpers Incorrect, drives will not be picked up in bios, they will whats called Shadow Each other out.

Plug the hard drive on its own in.

If that works,

Unplug the hard drive, try plugging only the CD drive in.

If that works, Then you know you have incorrect Jumpers.

One must be set too Master (hard drive)

and

One must be set too Slave (CD Drive)
 
Hard drive is master. CD drive is slave. Both are plugged into the correct slot on the board.
What about a jumper on the board itself? There are two. One was laying in the bottom of the tower when I opened it.
The tower is a Dell 8200.
Does that help?
 
One at a time didn't do anything for me. I also tried to plug the HD into the cd slot. That didn't help either.
When everything is plugged in the right slots I do get a very quick blue screen. How can I stop it so I can read it?
 
So you can get into your bio's? Try setting every thing to default settings. Make sure that you have your bios set to detect the Cd first then your HD. You will want to change that later to HD as the first detect, but for now you need the cd detected. You will need to load some chipset drivers and boot into windows.

If you have already tried that, then I would say that you might try updating your bios to the latest rev. Go to dell and look for the newest bios update.

http://search.dell.com/results.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&cat=sup&k=8200&qmp=12&p=1&subcat=dyd&rf=all&nk=f&sort=K&snpsd=A&navla=19019%7e7%7e140262&ira=False&~srd=False&ipsys=False&advsrch=False&~ck=bt
 
Still not working

I was wondering if a bad stick of ram would cause this to happen? Or maybe a bad mainboard? What about a bad IDE cable? I am at the end of my very limited knowledge and could use some help on other possible causes.

Thanks
 
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