[Pbman]

Insirion 8200

When turned on it says that the primary disc not found. Then it goes straight to a warning screen telling you to go to setup. Looking at bios set up, the HD and optical drives are "not installed". Through Dell's chat line they said that both the HD and cd unit were defective. I could see the HD , but the CD too? They said that a operating system has to be noticed in order for the computer to work. Without a HD wouldn't the machine go to a doss prompt anyway? I tried that by removing the HD

Dell wants $168 for a HD which is nuts because online I can get one much less. My question is about the CD unit. Has anyone ever seen those go too

thanks
Rich

 

[kiwiguy]

The laptop could never go to a "DOS prompt" without the HDD, as to do so would mean that it would have DOS (not the case with XP) and if it had DOS, it resides on the HDD anyway.

Optical drives are not always shown (detected) in BIOS, but the BIOS boot screen should indicate their detection at boot time.

A faulty HDD electronics would prevent it being seen, but a fault on the Dell motherboard IDE would prevent both from being seen.

 

[johnpost]

Insirion 8200

When turned on it says that the primary disc not found. Then it goes straight to a warning screen telling you to go to setup. Looking at bios set up, the HD and optical drives are "not installed". Through Dell's chat line they said that both the HD and cd unit were defective. I could see the HD , but the CD too? They said that a operating system has to be noticed in order for the computer to work. Without a HD wouldn't the machine go to a doss prompt anyway? I tried that by removing the HD

Dell wants $168 for a HD which is nuts because online I can get one much less. My question is about the CD unit. Has anyone ever seen those go too

thanks
Rich

in the BIOS change that IDE port to autodetect and see if it finds the
HD.

it's unclear to me about your BIOS. you can specify that nothing
is connected to an IDE port, the setting value may have been changed
to that. or doing an autodetect may have found nothing.

BIOS values can sometimes get changed. Depending on age of
computer it's remebering the settings can depend on a battery
(not the main power battery) or a capacitor.