Harddrive not found when optical drive attached

mmcandrew74 · 02-02-2008, 04:39 AM

I have a Dell Latitude c840.
It has stopped booting up properly.
When I reboot it hangs for 30 seconds while trying toad the bios then says 'Primary hard drive not found. Fixed Optical drive not found.'

I have tried reseating both drives and the battery.

The strange thing is that it will boot (to a command prompt on C:) if I removed the optical drive and the hard drive seems absolutely fine.

I have not yet installed an OS on my hard drive but I have copied win98 boot disk onto C:.

When I boot to C: (with the optical drive removed) I can push the optical drive back in and start windows in safe mode and can mount and read what's in the optical drive - so the optical drive appears to be OK too.

This is driving me nuts.
Could this be a problem with the motherboard itself?

Thanks,
Mike

**TriggerFinger** · 02-02-2008, 10:39 PM

This is a long shot but I suggest you try replacing either the CD drive or the HDD with a known working one. Example... try replacing HDD first and attempt to boot from CD drive. If this works you can say your previous HDD has a problem. Same procedure for the CD drive. If you can get/borrow a spare try booting from it (old HDD installed) and see. Either way you will know if you have a defective CD drive or HDD. If the results are the same as the problem you posted initially, then it could be a motherboard problem. But of course, my approach will be first to update BIOS to latest release. Then if it still behaves the same, I will do the example I wrote above.

02-02-2008, 04:39 AM	#1 (permalink)
mmcandrew74 Registered User Join Date: Feb 2008 Posts: 1 OS: None yet!	Harddrive not found when optical drive attached I have a Dell Latitude c840. It has stopped booting up properly. When I reboot it hangs for 30 seconds while trying toad the bios then says 'Primary hard drive not found. Fixed Optical drive not found.' I have tried reseating both drives and the battery. The strange thing is that it will boot (to a command prompt on C:) if I removed the optical drive and the hard drive seems absolutely fine. I have not yet installed an OS on my hard drive but I have copied win98 boot disk onto C:. When I boot to C: (with the optical drive removed) I can push the optical drive back in and start windows in safe mode and can mount and read what's in the optical drive - so the optical drive appears to be OK too. This is driving me nuts. Could this be a problem with the motherboard itself? Thanks, Mike

02-02-2008, 10:39 PM	#2 (permalink)
TriggerFinger Moderator Hardware Team Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: USA Posts: 11,211 OS: Windows 7 Beta, Vista SP1, XP SP3, PCLinuxOS2007	Re: Harddrive not found when optical drive attached This is a long shot but I suggest you try replacing either the CD drive or the HDD with a known working one. Example... try replacing HDD first and attempt to boot from CD drive. If this works you can say your previous HDD has a problem. Same procedure for the CD drive. If you can get/borrow a spare try booting from it (old HDD installed) and see. Either way you will know if you have a defective CD drive or HDD. If the results are the same as the problem you posted initially, then it could be a motherboard problem. But of course, my approach will be first to update BIOS to latest release. Then if it still behaves the same, I will do the example I wrote above.