windfall
Prominent Member
Hi All
I have had this really strange problem with my Dell Dim 5000 for a couple of months. I have a pair of SATA 250Gb (Western Digital) disks the D drive is the second physical disk. I have a dual boot so my first disk is plit for XP Pro and XP Media center. If your wondering why I have split them apart - its because once you fill up the XP Pro with all the junk software it runs slow. So for media usage I have a fairly basic media center installation.
The problem - When I boot into XP pro sometimes the second hard disk does not appear. I tried everything - nout in Device manager, disk management etc.
Then sometimes it appears! I do nothing - just reboot and its there.
Now in MCE it appears everytime without fail.
WASSUP do you think? I have changed the SATA cable 3 times and that is ruled out. when I boot the pc I hold it at the OS selection so that the drive has time to spin up (and be recognised by the system). But on the basis one OS see's it everytime and the other does not I have to sugges tto myself its a software issue.
One tip - if you buy a dell PC and want to retro fit a DISK to it, make sure you get the second SATA cable cos 99% of the retro fit cables wont fit in the dell case (on a Dim 5000). It took me ages to find one and dell never returned any of my emails or calls about it.
Cheers
Tone
I have had this really strange problem with my Dell Dim 5000 for a couple of months. I have a pair of SATA 250Gb (Western Digital) disks the D drive is the second physical disk. I have a dual boot so my first disk is plit for XP Pro and XP Media center. If your wondering why I have split them apart - its because once you fill up the XP Pro with all the junk software it runs slow. So for media usage I have a fairly basic media center installation.
The problem - When I boot into XP pro sometimes the second hard disk does not appear. I tried everything - nout in Device manager, disk management etc.
Then sometimes it appears! I do nothing - just reboot and its there.
Now in MCE it appears everytime without fail.
WASSUP do you think? I have changed the SATA cable 3 times and that is ruled out. when I boot the pc I hold it at the OS selection so that the drive has time to spin up (and be recognised by the system). But on the basis one OS see's it everytime and the other does not I have to sugges tto myself its a software issue.
One tip - if you buy a dell PC and want to retro fit a DISK to it, make sure you get the second SATA cable cos 99% of the retro fit cables wont fit in the dell case (on a Dim 5000). It took me ages to find one and dell never returned any of my emails or calls about it.
Cheers
Tone