Won't Boot, but F1 then Boots?

Friend has a DELL Dimension 4300 1.6 Ghz 128MB RAM Phoenix BIOS DELL V002 XP Home Edition. Just started giving error msg %26quot;Primary hard drive not found%26quot;





I checked the BIOS and it showed NO Hard drive or CD ROMS installed. It has 1 80 Gig hard drive and 1 CDRW ROM Drive and 1 CD ROM drive. The Hard drive (C:) is on the Primary Controller by itself, the two CD ROM drives are on the Secondary Controller.





I checked cables, and power connections, all good. Replaced cables to be sure, same problem.





I had a spare 160 Gig hard drive with XP Pro so I hooked it up, the Dell start screen comes up and the %26quot;Progress bar%26quot; goes to the end, then it waits a few seconds and gives error %26quot;Boot device not found, Press F1 to continue or F2 to go to SETUP%26quot; When I press F1 it boots fine everytime. When I check the BIOS it shows the hard drive correctly (160 gig) %26amp; the 2 CD ROM drives.





So WHY is it not finding the hard drive when you first turn the computer on, but can hit F1 %26amp; boots fine everytim

Won%26#039;t Boot, but F1 then Boots?
Sounds to me like The systems BIOS is either not functioning properly, or not capable of handling such large hard drives. I suggest going to dell.com, and downloading the latest BIOS for your make/model. This should solve the problem





One other thing that you could check would be the jumpers on the hard drive, make sure the jumper is set to either cable select, or master.
Reply:I don%26#039;t know if this is the problem but you can try checking the boot sequence.



brest cancer