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I got a used Dell, a Optiplex Gx1 from Silicon Salvage in Orange
County, CA.
I got a WD600 from Fries, and the system came with a 40GB hard drive.
I have tried jumpers, I have tried the EZ-Bios, I have tried both
drives. I still get a first drive not recognized type of error message
when I boot up. I have to push F1 to get the system to work, and it
does not always recognize the first parttion.

Is there a solution to this? It comes with the A10 bios, and that may
be the latest. Would an ATA board help? What can I do or must I just
bear this slow boot with intervention problem?

Sean Cleary

Sean Cleary wrote:
> I got a used Dell, a Optiplex Gx1 from Silicon Salvage in Orange
> County, CA.
> I got a WD600 from Fries, and the system came with a 40GB hard drive.
> I have tried jumpers, I have tried the EZ-Bios, I have tried both
> drives. I still get a first drive not recognized type of error message
> when I boot up. I have to push F1 to get the system to work, and it
> does not always recognize the first parttion.
>
> Is there a solution to this? It comes with the A10 bios, and that may
> be the latest. Would an ATA board help? What can I do or must I just
> bear this slow boot with intervention problem?
>
> Sean Cleary

your pc should take this with no problem
and don't use ez-bios, don't even go near it

what does the error message say

David Hough <> wrote in message news:<dqOdnSRksIBL1iSiRVn->...
> Sean
> I had a Dell P2 Optiplex that somehow trashed out the IDE driver. I
> blew it away and loaded it with W2k which had drivers that would work.
> Or if you have the Dell support disk for that machine, it might have
> the W98 drivers on it. Does the CDrom work?

machine boots up.
Dell screen comes up
Dell bios bar goes from left to right
Dell screen goes away

and with or without the EZ-Bios, with hard drive bios noting user at
sensible max, or auto or user at nonsensible max the following message
is displayed:

Primary hard disk drive 1 not found
Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility

It does not recognize the drive it arrived with either. Same
situation.
Please help.
Sean

David Hough <> wrote in message news:<dqOdnSRksIBL1iSiRVn->...
> Sean
> I had a Dell P2 Optiplex that somehow trashed out the IDE driver. I
> blew it away and loaded it with W2k which had drivers that would work.
> Or if you have the Dell support disk for that machine, it might have
> the W98 drivers on it. Does the CDrom work?

I do not have the dell support disk. Could you send me the drivers you
used?
The email is either the above, or if they are larger than 1Meg, use
sean early aug at juno dot com (no spaces)
After I push the F1 button I usually get access to that hard drive
disk, but if I use a Win98 boot diskette I do not get access to the
whole disk, only partitions smaller than ? (well 10G showed up)

The CDrom reader works only if the software enables it, long past this
problem. So I can not boot from CD. I can access the CD if I use the
Win98 boot diskette, or if I install win98 on my machine. Right now
the machine is recovering from me using the latest Fdisk*, followed by
no access to that disk, followed by EZ-Bios, followed by writing all
zeros to that disk via EZ-bios. Now I am back where I started in terms
of behavior.

*microsoft has an improved fdisk that was said to help with accessing
large drives.

I called Dell.
They did not solve it, but they helped me realize a solution which
worked just as well.
We were trading cables. I took the cables off the CD rom drives -- and
got the same complaint about them (secondary drive etc...)
I went into the setup and changed the word AUTO to the word NONE and
the problem has gone away. In every other computer it has never
mattered much, but the dell will stop and ask a question and refuse to
contunue.
Thank you for your support anyway,
Sean

Sean
I don't have the win98 drivers. We bought these Dells (four of them)
refurbed from a reseller. When I couldn't get rid of the yellow "!" in
the devise table for the IDE and I was getting write failures on the
CDrom, I loaded Win2k and it came up clean. We have a couple of new
Dells. Tomorrow I'll see if I can find a Win98 driver for you.
Dave