I have a 20 month old Dell Dimension 4600 running XP with 2 Hard disks installed. The PC was running fine until yesterday when it reported that no hard disks could be found on the system.
I removed the 2nd HD (slave) and tried it on a different PC, and the HD seems to be perfectly OK.
Trying to boot up the Dell with just one (master) HD, seemed to work fine as well - at least, initially.
Thinking that the HD cables may have become defective, I swapped it out and now the Dell refuses to work again (Error message being no primary drive found) - regardless of whether I use the old cable or the new cable.
Am I right in assuming that this indicates a faulty IDE controller (on the mobo)?
If yes, is there any way of getting around the problem - e.g. installing an IDE controller card (and somehow designating this as the primary controller and disabling the mobo controller)?
Any advice would be much appreciated.
I removed the 2nd HD (slave) and tried it on a different PC, and the HD seems to be perfectly OK.
Trying to boot up the Dell with just one (master) HD, seemed to work fine as well - at least, initially.
Thinking that the HD cables may have become defective, I swapped it out and now the Dell refuses to work again (Error message being no primary drive found) - regardless of whether I use the old cable or the new cable.
Am I right in assuming that this indicates a faulty IDE controller (on the mobo)?
If yes, is there any way of getting around the problem - e.g. installing an IDE controller card (and somehow designating this as the primary controller and disabling the mobo controller)?
Any advice would be much appreciated.