BIOS & Hard drive detection problem

[seantm]

Howdy folks thanks in advance for the great service your providing!

Here's my problem: I have a slightly used Dell Optiplex GX1 pentium 450L. It was running fine until I tried to add a second hard drive to it.
I've given up the 2nd drive idea for now but the machine isn't the same anymore.

I put the jumper back were it was originally and set everything back in the bios (Phoenix)the same --I believe-- but now the orignal Maxtor primary hard drive can't be found at all. here's the error message I'm getting:

"Primary hard disk drive 0 not found
strike the F1 key to continue or F2 to run the setup utility"

When I hit F1 I get the following error:

"PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-MOF: exiting PXE"

Well I've checked and rechecked the cable, tried a couple of different ones and no luck. It's getting power so it seems the power plug is fine...

Any suggestions? It's a good machine and I'd like to get it running... Thanks again--

[mcjamesk]

hit f2 and run setup utility

[seantm]

thanks for responding --I don't mean to sound unappreciative butas I wrote when I posted --I went to the setup and reset everything --I've acutally done this a number of times--and I'm still having the issue --so any other ideas?
--thanks ---STM

[Midknyte]

Are you sure the jumper is in the right place? most maxtors use the j50 (the jumper nearest the ide cable) as the master jumper. The only other thing would be to check out the system with another drive to make sure the motherboard is working right.

[Vernon Frazee]

Get into CMOS/BIOS Setup and make sure the Hard Drive is set as the first boot device.

[Ifish25]

I haven't yet entered the world of two HD's, but you might try running fdisk to see if the primary partition is identified. The attempted installation of the second HD could have altered the obvious. Just look for anything odd on fdisk readout, such as undefined files system or no active drive identified. If fdisk does not correctly ID the drive, zapping and formatting may be the only alternative to bring it "online." If nothing shows up, count this advice as ignorant.

[bluemoon]

And after you've done what Ifish25 had suggested and without sucess,you can always low format your disk using utility from Maxtor.-----You will lose all data on the hard disk though.