SATA Primary Drive 0 not found, primary drive 1 not found, no DVD found Dell Dimension 4700

I suppose this goes under the heading "No good deed goes unpunished."

My friend told me her computer stopped working shortly (when exactly,
I don't know) after she opened an attachment in an email and a virus
message apperared. Believe it or not, she said it was the "viagra
virus'.

Her saga continued.. she enlisted the help of her son's friend Andy,
who "knew a lot about computers". Andy poked around (goodness knows
what he did) and said it was a hard drive failure.

My friend tells me about it.. Well, I called Andy, and it sounded
reasonable to me that perhaps the SATA hard drive crashed. Funny,
though, I ignored the fact that my friend took the computer to a mom
and pop shop computer place, who said that BOTH the DVD drive and the
HD had failed.

I took a very quick look, saw the error message that said there were
no bootable drives, and recommended to change the HD. Friends like me
she doesn't need...

Well, of course the replaced HD didn't improve things. Off to best
buy we went with the computer for the Geek Squad to take a quick look.
We had just purchased the HD from there the week earlier. The guy was
very nice, took his time, and diagnosed the problem as either a
motherboard or CPU failure.

Ok.. I should have stopped here, but Noooooooo. I picked up the
identical motherboard on ebay for 60 bucks, and yep..you guessed it..
no change...same message.

I had set up the new mb exactly the same. I did not pull the only
card in the slot, a modem. I suppose I could do that to make sure I'm
starting from square 1.

I'm not an expert, but I'm thinking although It Must be the CPU.. how
could that be?

I'm trying to help my friend here, but this is costing me time and her
money. Any suggestions would be appreciated !

Larry
please remove you know what from the signature to reply via email, thank you

 

As I read it, the original problem was that the computer became infected by a virus. Why, then, did no one think to remove the virus?

By now, the computer has been changed so many times by so many people that, in my opinion, the best thing to do is to backup whatever files and folders are needed, and then perform a clean install. With a clean install -- provided it is done correctly -- you know that the software is OK. Any further problems, if they exist, would be caused by hardware.

Have your friend read this: "Protect Your PC"
http://www.microsoft.com/protect


Steven

 

The first thing to check is if the drives are getting power. Is the
hard drive spinning up? If not, the power supply has died. Replace it
and everything should be fine. Just the blinking lights mean nothing.
That's 3 volt, and the drive motor is 12 volt. It's not unusual for
half of a power supply to fail, leaving a motherboard that works fine
but a bunch of dead drives. If the hard drive spins up, move on.

The next thing to try would be the setup utility (press F2 before
Windows starts to load) and see if the BIOS is recognizing the drives.
If it is, the drive electronics are reporting drive parms to the plug-n-
play BIOS, and both the motherboard and drive are alive. I can see a
virus scrambling the CMOS to make the computer unusable. Check to make
sure all the hardware is set up properly and not disabled in BIOS. Did
you think to spend $3 on a new battery for the CMOS?

If that doesn't fix it, set the CD as bootable, and try rebooting with
the Windows setup or the Dell recovery disk in the CD drive. If you can
boot to a DOS prompt, run 'FDISK /STATUS' to get a read on the partition
status of your hard drives. If the CD won't boot and there is a floppy,
you can always boot to DOS from a floppy and try the same thing. Do a
system format (format /s) on the floppy and copy the drive utilities
like fdisk over. I don't know exactly how the loader works, but I know
that if I boot my computer from the Norton System works CD, it won't
recognize the SATA hard drive. I don't know if that's because Norton
won't do NTFS or if the computer has to load something from the boot
sector to let it read SATA. If you can't actually read the hard drive,
don't get too upset. You don't have to read it to check the status.

Dell normally ships their computers with a hidden recovery partition,
and you can use fdisk to set that partition as active and try a reboot.
If it still won't boot from the hard drive, bite the bullet. Copy all
the partition information to a sheet of paper and then run fdisk /MBR to
write a new Master Boot Record. You may have to create new partitions
and reformat to get the hard drive working, in which case you will lose
everything. You may be able to get it back with a data recovery
utility, but only if you re-create the partitions exactly as they were
when the computer was last operational.

The guy from Best should have done all this stuff, but who knows? If
you can run the BIOS setup, the CPU is not totally dead, and probably
OK.

 

I really appreciate the reply.

So far, to resolve the problem:
Replaced SATA hd
Replaced mb with identical Dell mb
Replaced the DVD ROM with an old (but working CD)
New CMOS battery

Yes, it does boot up now from the CD ROM after I replaced it.
I've done F2 so many times I may look for an F2 key on my cellphone.

I've restored system defaults.
I see NO SATA drive. I've rebooted, restored system settings many
times.

I've replaced the SATA cable that came with the new hd with the old
SATA setup with a separate power cable and cable to the mb.

I have no floppy installed, but I could do that to try and find that
SATA drive. Unfortunately, the system BIOS doesn't recognize it.

I can't do much with the SATA cables/power cable.

I have set the CD as bootable, and get a blue windows setup screen
from the Dell Reinstallation CD. I get just so far, then I get an
error message
"file gl1280.sys is corrupted" (sometimes I get different file errors"
and the setup halts, and the only option is to reboot.

So.... Afte all this... Whatcould be my options?

THanks for reading this!

Larry

Larry

 

I tried to reformat/reinstall WIN XP on a SATA drive and but the drive
wasn't recognized by the boot CD. A techie I know said the version of XP I
had doesn't recognize SATA drives natively and I had to install some special
driver or similar file before it would see it.

Once I did that, the drive was recognized and I got a normal install. Wish I
could remember more of the details but it was a good while ago.

Jos.

 

Have you tried the SATA in both connectors 0 and 1?
Is the setup set to boot from the above?
Do the diagnostic lights on the back tekk you anything?
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4700/sm/adtshoot.htm#wp1054305
The service manual is located here;
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4700/sm/index.htm

 

Stick that stethoscope on the drive and make sure it is spinning up.

Do you mean the BIOS is not recognizing the SATA drive? That's a big
oops. Check the Dell site for an upgrade to the BIOS. If the BIOS
still doesn't recognize the drive, you have a hardware problem. Since
you have replaced the drive and the motherboard, that pretty much leaves
the power supply.

Google doesn't find anything on a 'gl1280.sys'. You can find almost
every Windows driver file on the net, so that is pretty strange. Log
onto the Dell support site, do a technician chat and see if they can
dredge something out of their knowledge base. That might suggest a
solution. Probably not, but maybe.

The boot message indicates you may have a SATA driver problem. Google
'dell SATA driver' and do some reading. If you are trying to boot to
your new hard drive, the drive manufacturer should have included the
driver. If you are trying to boot to the old hard drive, the driver is
on the boot sector of the drive, but the BIOS isn't recognizing the
drive, so you can't get to it. You have to get the BIOS to recognize
the drive before you can do anything else.

 

I don't have the BIOS for this system memorized, but virtually any BIOS on
and IDE+SATA system is going to have an IDE configuration setting. Choices
will look like:

Native/compatible mode on PATA-SATA
Native/compatible mode on PATA only
AHCI
Configure SATA as standard IDE
etc., etc.

Having these set wrong can make all (or just some) of the drives disappear.
Note that if this is happening, the drives will not show in the BIOS. If
they are listed there, than this is not the problem. If they are not listed,
then I'd say there's a pretty good chance the first kid who "knew a lot . .
.." went into the bios and screwed up these settings. Then when you used the
"exact same" settings on the new MB, you copied over the same mistake.

You can try different settings until drives start to show up. Reboot into
the BIOS after each change and see if the drives are detected. If you go
from no drives to one or two at some point, you know this is the problem and
can keep working until they all show up. Note that after you get them all
detected, you still may need to F6 and load "a third party RAID or SCSI
driver" during the XP install.

Most common settings are: "configure SATA as standard IDE" *combined with*
"Native mode on PATA+SATA"

-Mike