I have a dell 8300, XP, and i tried to install a new 120gb hard drive as my master and make my original 60gb as a slave. I wanted to image my original, put it on my new one so I can format my original and start adding stuff i wanted to save on my original, like a backup and run the computer off the new one because it was faster. I noticed that the boot process was much slower, i'm guessing it was because it was uploading the OS from my slave(original).

So i put the original one back and when i start my computer, the Bios checking takes longer and i get a message that says:

"primary drive 1 not found"

My boot sequence is diskette, primary drive, cd. So i guess its my hard drive.

Then it askes me to press F1 to continue or F2 to go to setup utility. How do i solve this problem?

OK, I'm curious. How DO you solve the problem?

Do you press F1 and everthing works OK? Do you press F2 and have to make changes in BIOS Setup to continue? Do you get stuck at this point and can't proceed?

If you're getting stuck, check that you've configured the drives correctly. Primary drive - Jumper set to 'Master', drive attached to end connector of primary IDE cable. Secondary drive - jumper set to 'Slave', drive attached to middle connector of primary IDE cable

And don't forget to change everything back over if you swap them.

I did, I set the jumper back to master and the hard drive on end the connector of the ribbon cable, just like how i found it. I press F1 and it just continues like normal but performance is a little slower. When i press F2 it goes to the cmos settings and its back to the original settings.

I'm going to check it again when I go home, but I didn't see a difference in the cmos settings.

Perhaps the CMOS battery is dead or dying? sounds likely to me. I'd replace it to see if that fixes things. They don't cost much

Dell systems work better on Cable select. Try setting it like that, with the master drive on the black connector, and the slave drive on the grey connector. It should work out like that. After you've done that, go into your BIOS, and light up the NumLock, CapsLock, and ScrollLock lights on your keyboard. Hold <Alt>+F, then hit <Alt>+E. After it stops beeping, hit <Alt>+B, and this will restart your system. That procedure sets your BIOS back to defaults, and it should force the system to redetect all of the IDE drives.

Do you guys get paid for helping people out? you should, you guys are good. Thanks a lot.

I had the same problem on an out of the box Dell 4600c. I googled the error (primary drive 0 not found), and many people thought that the motherboard was fried. Unfortunately, almost all the posts were concerning Dells . I thought that maybe the CMOS battery was dead so i pulled it out. On the board, a little plus sign was staring up at me and i looked at the battery. A little plus sign was staring at me there as well. So I flipped over the battery so the plus signs matched up (i cant believe dell installed a battery upside down!). It worked fine after that.

Well, that's interesting that the battery would be installed upside down.

You know what? Not trying to make excuses for anyone, but it is pretty easy to get those battery sides confused...

Another Dell with some settings garbled during a lightning strike. I had similar issue with the primary drive not found and XP Home crashing during install. I did the Alt+f, Alt+e, Alt+b and was able to continue. Thanks for the help. The Dell tech certified it as junk and the family replaced it through insurance. So I just picked up a 2.8GHz P4 for nothing!!!!:cheesy:

Found this old thread via Google. The alt+f, alt+e, alt+b trick saved me. Gotta love the internet!