I have a dell dimension 8200, Bios Version A08, with a Maxtor 6Lo40J2 hard drive. Upon start-up (before XP even starts), a great deal of time passes with no data, then an error message of "Primary hard disk drive 1 not found" message appears, and asks me to either hit F1 to continue or F2 to run a setup utility. If I hit F1, Windows starts.

VEry annoying -- any thoughts? Had a nother problem where my CD-rom drives weren't being recognized but I seemed to have fixed that--

Make sure Autodetect is selected for the HDD in BIOS.
Next time you reboot and get the error hit F2 instead of F1 it may just be a
matter of a specific HDD being specified in BIOS that is not the one in the
box.

"help" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:9D048D14-FAE7-4CDD-8C8F-(E-Mail Removed)...
>I have a dell dimension 8200, Bios Version A08, with a Maxtor 6Lo40J2 hard
>drive. Upon start-up (before XP even starts), a great deal of time passes
>with no data, then an error message of "Primary hard disk drive 1 not
>found" message appears, and asks me to either hit F1 to continue or F2 to
>run a setup utility. If I hit F1, Windows starts.
>
> VEry annoying -- any thoughts? Had a nother problem where my CD-rom
> drives weren't being recognized but I seemed to have fixed that--

help wrote:

>I have a dell dimension 8200, Bios Version A08, with a Maxtor 6Lo40J2 hard drive. Upon start-up (before XP even starts), a great deal of time passes with no data, then an error message of "Primary hard disk drive 1 not found" message appears, and asks me to either hit F1 to continue or F2 to run a setup utility. If I hit F1, Windows starts.


You have hardware trouble. Maybe just the drive not running up quickly
enough, but that is not common with those drives. I would get it
checked out by a competent repair shop. Or back to Dell under warranty
if it is new enough


--
Alex Nichol MS MVP (Windows Technologies)
Bournemouth, U.K. (E-Mail Removed) (remove the D8 bit)

On Sun, 21 Mar 2004 13:01:07 -0800, "help"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>I have a dell dimension 8200, Bios Version A08, with a Maxtor 6Lo40J2 hard drive.
>Upon start-up (before XP even starts), a great deal of time passes with no data,
>then an error message of "Primary hard disk drive 1 not found" message appears,
>and asks me to either hit F1 to continue or F2 to run a setup utility.
>If I hit F1, Windows starts.

I'm thinking that if your computer has only one HD then the bios
probably recognizes it as disk "0" (zero) not disk 1.

Therefore the message you're getting is basically saying that there's
a second disk (disk 1) that it is looking for but since it is not
there, it can't find it. This searching is what causes your boot
delay.

Go into your bios (hit F2 as the screen prompt indicates) and change
the setting for that second, non-existant disk.