Bios can't see my hard drive

[homznmt]

Hi all! I replaced the fried hd in my Dell Dimension with a Seagate 160 sata drive and installed XP & other software on it. But when I reboot, the computer goes to bios, saying it can't find hard drive 0. If I hit F1 to continue, the next screen lists XP, so I can go into Windows that way and it all works great.

*Another site* told me to set the jumper pins to cable connect, so I did that...is that what my problem is? Should it be set to master? It's been a long time since I've installed any hardware and am pretty rusty!

Thanks for your help.

 

[MrLinux]

Assuming this is Parallel ATA...
If this is the only device on the cable, and drive is set to Cable Select (CS) the drive needs to be at the end of the cable, (not the middle).

 

[dEAne]

I don't think so. If this is a sata drive make sure the sata cable is connected well - HD to motherboard and the power cable. Go the BIOS check if the HD is detected.

 

[geofelt]

If you have a sata drive, there is no master/slave. That is for IDE only.

Access the bios and set the new drive to the first boot device(possibly excepting the dvd).
You should not see any other possible drives.

I think the windows boot manager thinks there is another drive available to boot from.
Do some googling on how to fix XP boot manager issues. I know it can be done, I am not expert there.

 

[homznmt]

I did go to the Microsoft site and am looking for boot manager info. When I find out what's going on I'll let ya'll know. Thanks for the replies.

 

[homznmt]

Best answer selected by homznmt.