I have a (dell dimension 4550 series) tower that FroshKiller so kindly gave me a while back, all it needed was a hard drive. I tossed in an old 80gig seagate I had lying around (with lots of junk on it, but came from a working PC), made sure the jumper was on master/single (or should I put it on cable select?) and I'm having trouble getting it to boot. Bios loads and performs some preliminary checks, and this is where it hangs up:

Diskette drive 0 seek failure
Diskette drive 0 seek failure
Secondary hard disk drive 0 not found
     Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility

_

8/4/2010 6:02:25 PM

set jumper to cable select if it's the sole hard drive

8/4/2010 6:04:21 PM

put the jumper on cable select

on POST, go into the BIOS menu, make sure the hard drive shows up there and that you have the primary hard drive enabled, also check to make sure it boots to the proper hard drive in the boot sequence.

the hard drive you just dropped in may not have a MBR either, if that's the case you'll need to boot to CDROM with an OS CD in the drive and restore the MBR

[Edited on August 4, 2010 at 6:05 PM. Reason : .]

8/4/2010 6:04:38 PM

yeah, same thing with cable select. it definitely sees my HDD (it identifies it properly) as primary and is booting to it, which makes me think the disk is the problem

i guess next i'll try to boot from CD but i need to have a windows disk first

[Edited on August 4, 2010 at 6:28 PM. Reason : [b]]

8/4/2010 6:22:24 PM

Let me know if you need any disks. You might want to grab a copy of Linux so you can boot from the disk. Ubuntu or Knoppix or something like that will work great. You can boot it from a USB drive too.

8/4/2010 10:42:29 PM