Help!

[nchristensen]

I'm hoping someone here can help me. I have a Dell 8200 with dual 250GB Western Digital HDs, a CD/DVD burner and a DVD RAM drive, 1.5GB RAM. This system had been working fine until I popped in another drive that I have and need to recover data from (it's in a constant reboot mode and won't launch Win XP - but this is a different issue). After swapping the drives back to the original config I got an error during the POST stating the the primary drive 0 and 1 are unrecognized and to run setup (F2). Running setup didn't help - "Unknown Device" in BIOS setup. Following Dell directions I swapped cables, pulled out all boards, RAM, etc. After that now all 4 drives - primary and secondary are unrecognized. They sent me a new motherboard and I've swapped that in. I replaced the power supply and cables to these drives...and still all 4 are unrecognized. They told me to do a drive reset using ALT commands during the POST but this hasn't worked either. I'm stumped. The only thing I haven't replaced is the I/O board/cable assembly. Dell told me if the drives didn't work after the ALT commands then all the drives are bad - but this can't be the case since I can take drives from an old system that still function properly and they aren't recognized either - these drive are too big for the system to do the reverse swap. What am I missing? Thanks for any advice you may have.

NMC

[Grumper]

Try going into setup and setting your BIOS to " restore default settings" It might help

Are all your IDE drives set to "auto" default should do that--or you can do it also--while your in there make your floppy 1st in line for booting up.Just a precaution for accessing your system later.

[Beta Geek]

Have you tried booting with only your boot drive connected? In other words, disconnect all IDE drives except for the primary master and try to boot. If that works add the secondary master, and try that. Then add the secondary slave and then the primary slave (if you have one). That probably won't work, but it's worth a try.

And Welcome to the PC Guide forums!