primary drive 1 not found

[Bob Hansen]

Hi Group,
I just did a full reformat form my XP CD. Now when I boot, I get the Dell
logo screen and then the message "primary drive not found." If I hit F1 at
that point, It boots into windows no problem. If I go into setup, In "drive
configuration", I see Diskette drive A:,
SATA primary drive.....off.
SATA secondary drive.....off.
Primary master drive.......Hard Drive,
Primary Slave Drive.......unknown device.
Secondary master drive......CD-Rom Device.
Secondary Slave Drive.....CD-Rom Device.
IDE Drive UDMA........on.
Under "hard disk drive sequence" I see: "System bios boot devices"
Boot sequence is: Hard disk drive C: is first.
It does appear to recognize the hard drive as the "primary master drive" and
can see it as a Maxtor 6Y080L.

This machine has 1 hard drive, one partition, 80 gig, a DVD-rom drive and a
CDRW drive.
I hope I've given enough information here and any ideas about getting this
to boot properly will be appreciated.
Bob

 

[JS]

Some Dell computers, especially the newer ones came with a restore partition
in addition to the XP boot partition.
It's possible when you did a reformat and installed XP you lost this
partition.
Is you XP CD a Dell supplied CD?

JS

 

[Bob Hansen]

Thanks JS. No, the Dell CD got scratched (still might be usable, though). So
I used a copy of XP that I purchased retail. Do you think I might have to
use the Dell CD or is there some way I can use the MS CD?
Bob

 

[JS]

See this article, it just might fix your issue:
http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-10149-0.html?forumID=7&threadID=162197&messageID=1797926

JS

 

[Guest]

Is it saying "Press F1 to continue" ? So you do?
Do you know how to enter the BIOS? There's a setting to enable/disable
system messages/logo in some Bios to get a more verbose bootup. [Usually
where the Quick Post is. Logo'd boot is "Silent...." or similar.] You may get
a better idea of what's going on without the logo.

 

[Bob Hansen]

Thanks JS, this sounds like my problem. I'll read it tonight.