Hello All,

I have a dell precision Workstation, which is a dual processor PIII 933mhz, 512 RDRAM, 2 SCSI 8.3GB HDD's.
Dvd rom/floppy

Now i want to remove the SCSI Disks and plug in my 160 or 80 GB IDE Hard drives.

I opened the Box, and then unplugged the scsi disks from the motherboard, and then with an ide cable i pluged the IDE Hard disk I have.

When i turn on the system, after initializing all, it says

"Dell's Disk Monitoring has noticed Primary 0 is not according to specification" its not exactly the msg i got but i remember this...

Now when the machine goes on further, it says strike the F1 key to continue or F2 to enter BIOS, when i enter BIOS its showing me the IDE Hard drive there, but it won't go any further then that, ....

though the hard disk has the boot files in it ...but it won't go any further then that..

any help wud be much appreiciated..

ah yes, it says EIDE connecter something as well?? do i need to buy a EIDE connector? Is that different from IDE connecter?

Any help wud be much appreicated
Thansk and regards
Mutahir

I'm not positive but I believe that is Dell's version of the S.M.A.R.T utility which monitors your hard drives for signs of failure. Try your other IDE hard drive and see if you still get that message. If everything works your other hard drive is most likely to blame. If you still get the error something is probably not configured correctly. Check your cables and make sure the drives are set properly (master/slave). You may need to go into the BIOS setup and configure it to boot from the IDE device rather than SCSI. Don't pay any attention to the EIDE/IDE thing, they are one and the same. Hope that helps.

Skyfrog is right, Dell's S.M.A.R.T. software has detected a problem with the drive. If it happens to be the 160gb drive try upgrading the System BIOS from Dell. It may not be properly detecting a drive that size.

hello, thanks for your replies....

i will try this tonite, is there any way i can save the updated bios on a floppy and then update it or i had to be online with that machine ?

thanks and regards
Mutahir

in the majority of cases Dell has both bootable floppy images and OS run images of the bioses, depends upon the model.

Hello iceman and sky,

i downloaded the bios file on a floppy, but when i plugged the 80GB hdd on the ide cable and i set the bios to not to look for the builtin Scsi controller and raid , it was detecting the 80GB Hdd, but when we come out of bios it said press F1 to continue or F2 to enter setup, so i just pressed F1 and it booted

but now the problem is not big, i can bootup to xp with that, but all the time it comes up with this press F1 to continue or Press F2 to enter setup and just before this screen it says Primary 0 not found, primary 1 not found and so for secondary, though i have secondary as my dvd burner.

many thanks for ur replies and if u have any suggestions/solutions for this error or mesage wud be greatful, and how would I now upgrade teh bios as iam now on the net, but that floppy of updated bios never seemed to work...

many thanks
Mutahir

Dell Precision and Optiplex system will Auto detect hard drives attached to a system, both IDE & SCSI, but it the IDE selection is set to AUTO and none is found it will error out like you are seeing. The same thing happens if no drives are attached to the SCSI controller.
If nothing is attached to the SCSI controller turn it off in the bios, and make sure each IDE selection in the bios has a coresponding device attached.

Why is it called S.M.A.R.T. when it gives such S.T.U.P.I.D. error messages?

Hello All,

I am back after some days off, i have decided that i would install windows server 2000 on the scsi drives which came with this dell precision 420.

how would i install the drivers for scsi? I have formatted them through the BIOS(low level format) Now when i put the cd of the OS in and reboot with cd how would i specify the scsi controller driver.

the scsi controller is :
Adaptec 7899 Ultra160/m low-voltage differential (LVD) small computer system interface (SCSI) controller.

Any idea where i can get its driver and the procedure to install it.

Many Thanks
Mutahir