Hard drive Unknown in Bios screen

[techlover]

I have a Dell Diminsion 4300. When I bring up the bios screen, only Primary Drive 0 (PD-0) has information. Primary Drive 1 and the two Secondary drives have 'unknown'. Presently they are set to off. In actuality, there are three IDE drives, PD-1 40 GB, SD-1 40 GB and PD-0 120 GB.

How do I get the bios to see the information for the two 'unknown' drives. Usually this isn't a problem for me when I run Windows XP but apparently grub (Linux) requires this information if I don't want to do the grub-install on PD-0.

Thanks in advance,

Larry

 

[Rick]

Primary Drive 1 and the two Secondary drives have 'unknown'.

Well, there's a reason for this... Maybe the jumpers aren't set correctly, maybe a drive or even both drives have failed, maybe there's a BIOS/firmware issue or maybe your cable is damaged or maybe.... you get the idea.

As you may know, the BIOS is totally independent of the OS and even the boot loader. GRUB, LILO, NTLDR... Doesn't matter... Your BIOS should still detect the drives.

I'm a Linux newb, but whenever I've had GRUB installed (via Redhat & Fedora core setup), I've never had to put in any geometry data or anything like that. So there might be a way to get GRUB up and running without that information, yeah? Try the Alternative OS forum for more details on that. Best of luck.