"Primary disk drive 0 cannot be found. Hit F1 to continue
or F2 to enter setup."
I went in and checked the drives in Computer Management
and everything is working fine. Could this be a BIOS
problem. This error appears on a dell server running 2000
server.
Ernest
This is your system BIOS reporting to you that it could not find the Primary
Slave hard disk drive as it is configured in the CMOS settings. This can be
caused by numerous things, such as incorrect jumper settings; loose,
defective, or incorrectly installed ribbon cable; wrong type ribbon cable;
loose or defective Molex power plug; defective power supply; defective (or
failing) hard drive; or the most likely culprit, incorrect CMOS settings for
your drive.
Make sure the hard drives (and all IDE devices) are plugged in correctly and
firmly. Make sure jumper settings are correct, and the Master for each
channel is on the end of the cable, and Slave is in the middle. If you're
using an ATA-66/100/133 drive on similar controller, make sure you're using
an 80-pin ribbon cable instead of a 40-pin. If you're only using one drive
on a channel, it will usually (not always) need to be set to Single instead
of Master. Make sure your CMOS settings for your drives are correct, and
that the cables are all routed correctly (it's easy to accidentally plug
your Primary-channel drives into the Secondary channel.) AUTO usually works
on modern systems with modern drives.
If all this fails to help, then I would look at the drive or power supply
for defective parts.
