Hi all,

Yesterday evening, I installed a Maxtor 200GB PATA hard drive into my Dell Dimension 8300 desktop. At first, I left the jumper cables at default. The one installed, was set @ cable select while the 200GB I installed was at cable select too. Tried booting up the system and there was no detection of the 200GB drive.

I tried again, and this time I set the installed drive's jumper @ master and left out the jumper(no jumper=slave) on the 200GB drive. Still wouldn't detect it.

Is there something I'm doing wrong here? BTW, this was a brand new 200GB drive I just opened from the Staples BF 2005 deal.

On the IDE cable, connect the Master hard drive on the middle connetor and the slav one on end one.

Is your BIOS up to date on the PC? I know I have experienced situations in the past when installing basic upgrades (RAM, HDs, etc) where the system either failed to POST or to recognize the upgrade until the BIOS was updated.

Go into your system BIOS. For the 2nd hard drive, change the setting from "NONE" to "AUTO".

I recall running into that same exact problem a while ago.

Whoa, I woldn't jump on BIOS update right away!

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ebytes, if above doesnt help leave the connections same and trying go into BIOS,
most of the time the first choice is hard drive setup, make sure all IDE channels are set to AUTO and non of them say disable or have incorrect values.
(say if you have old HD plugged in into IDE Slave but it says 200GB - value of
new one see if you can change settings to "auto" or select "detect" to make it scan for changes again.


edit: Darn, garsh beat me to it

Should I leave the jumpers the way it is now?

Main drive is set as master and secondary drive(200GB drive) is set as slave?

I didn't know this made a difference...

Thanks for the info everyone!

It only makes a difference when you have the jumpers set to cable select.

It doesn't when you have jumpers set but just in case

I am glad you found humor in that, but I can guarantee you that a Dell Optiplex GX300 will not recognize 256MB sticks of RAM without the most current BIOS, thus my suggestion. For the most part, Dell BIOS updates are quick and painless these days anyway.

From my experience, BIOS update should not be done as quick fix.
In this case jumpers could have been wrong, cable could have been connected at wrong place
and BIOS IDE settings could have been wrong, no one should ever update BIOS before checking those things,
if it still doesn't work after those things are 100% correct then BIOS could be
looked into, BIOS update it's not like updating your video card drives.
If it anint' broke, dont' fix it!

Thanks for the tip. This comes to show you the last time I installed a hard drive...

So now I did what you guys told me and went to the BIOs and change the setting from NONE to AUTO. Now my BIOs sees the 200GB drive, but detects it as 203GB. But what baffles me now is that when I restart and boot up to the desktop, the 200GB drive doesn't show. Only the default master drive shows

Do you have XP PRo or Home? You have to initialize the disk, if you have pro I know the steps of head,
if you have home let us know and someone will help


For pro, Start, right click on My Computer, select manage, go down to Disk Management, you should see the 2nd disk, right click on it and you should be able to select initialize.

This is correct. When you install a new hard drive in a computer you need to partition and format before you can see it in My Computer or Windows Explorer. This is done via Disk Management. Whether Home or Pro the Administrative Tools can be found in Control Panel. Click on Computer Management then Disk Management in the window that appears. Or Start>Run>compmgmt.msc

I popped in the installation disk and it worked! I partitioned my drive and now I can finally see my drive...

Thank you all!

Cool, glad you got it owrking, but using that installation disk creates a new set of problems that will not be apparant unless you ever decide to use that drive as a master and install XP on it. Those setup disks create a small partition that confuses the issue, but don't worry about it if you're just using it as a storage drive.

I was hoping to avoid using any install disks, but it seemed that my next best option would be to update the BIOS if I didn't do it.