hi yesterday i bought a new 160 gb IDE hard drive for my dell dimension 4600. i bought it to replace my dead hd which i couldnt access at all through my cpu. i opened up the computer and replaced the hd physically, set it as the master drive and booted up the computer with my windows xp start up disk in the cd drive. after the boot screen come up and loads i get a message "strike f1 to retry boot, f2 for setup utility". if i press f1 the message appears again and if i press f2 i get to setup. i set up my cd drive to boot first, that doesn't work, i have no idea what to do or what i did wrong. the system reads my hd and my cd drive and my dvd drive but wont start up. can somebody please help me im not a major computer person. thank you.
Replacing hard drive troubles
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When you said you set up the hard drive as the master, I thought you were talking about the jumper settings but evidently you weren't. On the back of the hard drive and the optical drive (CD drive) there is a plastic/metal jumper that you can move to different pins sets: master, slave and cable select. They should be marked somehow as to which is which. As I said before Dell often uses cable select (CS). For cable select to work, both devices on the same IDE cable must be set to cable select. Alternately, you can set one to master and the other to slave. So if the hard drive and the optical drive are on the same IDE ribbon cable, check the settings on the back of both drives. Chances are the optical drive will already be set on CS. If so, set the hard drive to cable select too.
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