Primary Drive 0 Not Found

A friend recently purchased a new Dell Dimension 2400 series, running WinXp Home. During the last week or two he noticed that the system would occasionally run extremely slow, at times taking upwards of 10 to 15 minutes to open a program. He powered the machine down until I could get a chance to look at.

Now upon booting the machine the following message is displayed;

Primer Driver 0 Not found

In accessing the BIOS it says that a hard-drive is not installed. Have checked all connections to the drive, everything is seated, but still no luck.

Any suggestions?? Or is the drive toast??

 

It might be. But call Dell to get the hard drive diagnostics tool and run it. It may be some corruption in the boot sector that needs repairing.

 

Diagnostics disk came with it. Ran a thorough test, everything passes. Dell also has indicator lights on the back of the computer that are supposed to alert you to different hardware problems. All of the lights are lit green, which according to the systems manual is what how they should appear if everything is working right.

??????

 

If the BIOS can't see the drive, it's not there = cable disconnected or reversed, electronics on the drive failed or motors or surface unavailable i.e. "toast" as you said.

Assuming you have tried another power and data cable, checked jumper, etc.

 

It could be the Primary HDD controller. Try hooking it up to the Secondary controller.

You could also, if you have another PC, try slaving the problem HHD to it and see if the other PC sees the HDD as a slave. Don't forget to jumper the two HDD's for master/slave config.

 

Hi,

Diagostics utilites "see" the drive, BIOS does not (correct?). I would go with Ray's theory about a corrupt Boot Sector. If it came with a Dell "restore" disk, it might be able to repair the corrupt information. You may need to repartition the drive with the diagnostics utility (?). If there is important data to save try getting it with dobhar's slaving suggestion. Dell's website may be able to tell you how to low-level format the drive which will leave the drive completely blank, also check their community forum for info and ask questions (they may know any special proceedures/setups).

Matt

 

This machine should be under warranty if "recently purchased ". Why not involve
Dell?

Simplest test is repalce the drive, and if different drive works, this drive is "toast ".

Diagnostics "ran "; did not necessarily see a drive. IMO and experience, if the drive is not visible to BIOS, no program can test it (although special hardware may) or fix it! So diagnostics can't report a bad drive if the drive is invisible to the program.

 

The machine is under warranty, but was trying to save myself some work by looking for some ideas short of removing the hard-drive and replacing with a new one and then having to reinstall all of the apps. As for contacting Dell, have plans to do that if unable to find a solution.

Don't know what experience you've had, but whether it's Dell, or any other manufacturer for that matter, you seem to spend a great deal of your time being transferred from one location to another, or the tech on the other end of the line hasn't the foggiest idea, nor time, nor inclination, as to how to resolve the issue. Called a major computer manufacturer's tech support a couple of years ago for a drive that wouldn't boot into windows. After only about 10 minutes they gave up and stated that the only resolution they could think of was to format the drive and start over. After taking their advice and getting the operating reinstalled and getting back on the net I was able to find a solution at Microsoft, within minutes, that involved simply copying some missing system files from the CD, into the system32 directory. So what could have been maybe a half hour fix ended up taking days to reinstall all of the windows updates, other apps, etc.

Oh well, we live and learn!

 

Incorrect. If the BIOS does not detect the HDD, often times it is a case of a loose cable connection or having the incorrect jumper settings. (Or in worst case scenario, the HDD itself is dead).

If it was a case of a corrupt boot sector, the BIOS would most likely, at minimum, see the hard drive (provided the HDD is functional) and fail to load the GUI for the OS. At the very least, it would give the user a C:\ prompt.

A corrupt boot sector on a HDD is fairly rare these days.

 

Hi sparrow and Maverick

I should have explained myself. I have had cases where the BIOS could not see/recognise the drive, but the HDD manufacturer's diagnostics could see and read it. They related to the BIOS size limitation (where the BIOS cannot recognise drives over a certain size) and corrupt Dynamic Drive Overlays (Disk Managers). Whether Dell would use a DDO to run an "oversized" disk drive, I don't know (that why I suggested doing a "restore ").

also...
I think that Rod should try using any harddrive utilities that were supplied, if there isn't any important data to be retrieved and it is hoped that Dell may be able to salvage it. I agree that it is a case for warranty, but it may be a lot quicker if Rod can sort it out.

I would not worry about using any of harddrive utilities that were supplied by Dell, try them all. The information on the drive will probably be lost though. Using the utilities supplied by Dell would not void the warranty.

Hope I have explained myself a bit better
Matt

 

Agreed. There may be some diagnstic I'm not aware of that can see hardware the BIOS can't. But I understand that companies that try to recover data from bad drives use hardware to do it, such as external motors and electronics.
I've used Norton's disk editor a few times, but it only works if the bios can see the drive and the drive spins up.

If the diagnostic says it sees the drive, OK, but if it runs and doesn't find anything wrong, NO, it hasn't seen the drive.