HI everyone,

I have aquired a Dell Precision 420MT to act as a small home server, however I am having problems with adding an 80GB primary hard disk, which I plan to install FC6 on to.

When I have the hard disk in, the bios can not detect any other devices, however if I remove the disk or place a smaller disk in there (20GB) then all the devices are seen, and the machine boots.

I have upgraded the BIOS on the machine, but I am still seeing the same thing.

Anyone else had this problem, or know of a work around so that this machine will boot with a 80GB+ hard drive in it.

Thanks in advance.

Have you checked the master slave jumpering on the disks? Most systems have a primary IDE bus and a secondary IDE bus. Each bus can support 1 master device and one slave device. If you move the drive with the MBR form the primary master setting, then BIOS won't find the MBR and won't boot.

It is probably best to leave the original drive as primary master, and add the 80 gig drive as primary slave; or secondary master. Usually if you have a CDrom, it will be set to slave. Most new systems with on HD and a CDRom would have the HD as primary, and CD as primary slave. Some makers don't supply the secondary cables, only the socket on the system board. You may have to go buy a cable.

Just to make life more difficult, some drives support autoselect. You need autoselect cables for it to work. The Idea is to set the jumpers to autoselect on the devices, and let the BIOS sort out who is master and slave. I don't like it since it leads to a lot of confusion.

Some drives have the jumper positions marked, and some do not. If you have the documentation for the drive, have a look to find the jumper settings. Otherwise you may have to find the manufactures web site and find it there.

Hope this helps.

Hi Cliff thanks for your reply,

In the end I just swap the disk for another 80GB hard disk (maxtor) the one that was failing was a Western digital disk, and for some reason it was causing all manner of hell with the bios setting.

I double checked the jumper settings before swapping the disks out, as I know that they can cause all manner of hell when you have many different disks on different IDE channels.

It just seems that the western digital disk is being awkward, as it works fine in my dell desktop machine. Just one of those weird things that computers do, like a machine that won't boot if the ethernet cable is in. (Yup that is my next problem to fix)

Thanks again.

Grant