Primary hard drive disk 0 not found (resurrecting an old laptop)

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I have an old Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop which has 256 MB memory, 600 MHZ processor, and a 10 GB hard drive. The system runs slow because of hardware constraints. It originally had Windows ME ( I think) and I upgraded to Windows XP Home Edition. I want to change the 10 GB hard drive to a Western Digital 80GB hard drive. I have formatted the new drive and placed it in the laptop and tried to install Win XP, but I keep getting an error message that there is no hard drive in the machine. The laptop runs when the 10 GB hard drive is in the machine, but will not recognize the new 80 GB drive. In the BIOS, the new hard drive is not recognized.

I have attached the 80 GB hard drive to this laptop and another computer using a USB/PATA cable and it is recognized. I have copied, cloned, duplicated, etc. the 10 GB drive to the 80 GB drive, but the laptop refuses to detect the new hard drive. The BIOS is old (2000) and does not have a lot of options to tweak regarding disk drives.

I was wondering if the BIOS is too old to upgrade to recognize additional features of PATA hard drives (IDE 40, IDE 60, etc.) or obviously, i’s missing something.

This is an on going battle between myself and this laptop, and unfortunately, I have been on the unsuccessful side for the last year. Any suggestions, other than forget about it?

Thanks for any help.

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Does the disk have jumpers for Master/Slave/Cable Select?

Jerry

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The 10 GB HD does not use jumpers, so I guess the 80 GB unit doesn’t either. There is a pin adaptor that needs to be put on the HD before insertion into the laptop and I don’t think there is enough room for jumpers.

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Or maybe it needs SATA controller drivers to be loaded prior to clean install.

The Right Way To Install Windows XP
37078-install_1

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I couldn’t find and sata controller drivers for my system.

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I was wondering if the BIOS is too old to upgrade to recognize additional features of PATA hard drives (IDE 40, IDE 60, etc.) or obviously, i’s missing something.

I suspect that the IDE controller on that laptop doesn’t still support eIDE and ATA-2 specifications to be able to detect the 80GB PATA drive.

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As suggested check the jumpers on the drive, I’d also use an 80 wire IDE cable, faster throughputs needed the extra isolation. Is there a detect option in the BIOS for the IDE channel the drive is on? Also if you see something in the BIOS for large drive or LBA support you want that to be enabled. I have a computer manufactured in 1998 running Windows 7 on a 320 gig drive so BIOS support goes back quite a long way…I believe it wasn’t until August of 2004 (release of XP SP2) that Windows caught up to drives in excess of 137 gigs.

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I used to have 120GB and even 160GB IDE drives running in my old C600 Latitudes, which was a close cousin of the Inspiron 4000. You should have no trouble using a 80GB IDE drive.

However, note those laptops used a pin adapter (pic here) on the hard drive, so did you neglect to remove the adapter from the old drive and transfer it to the new drive? Without it, then of course the BIOS won’t see any drive connected.

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You’ll need to re-varify that you have the right replacement drive. If it does not show up in BIOS, there will be nothing that you are going to be able to do to get it to work, especially if it does not utilize jumpers;
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-set-jumpers-for-your-computers-ide-drive.html
Check your connections between HD and laptop and make sure that they match up. Laptops can be extremely picky.

SATA drivers should be found on the driver disk you have for that make and model, or else located as part of Dell’s driver download for same. But the drive must be recognized in BIOS.
You will need a USB or floppy drive to copy them to for when you are ready to install the OS.
(press F6 to install said drivers from USB or Floppy)??

The alternative would be a slip streamed XP installation disk, (which is probably what your original OEM installation disk is) as far
as the SATA drivers go.
The first thing to do is get the drivers, then worry about getting them installed when the OS setup routine asks for them.

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I think this laptop predates SATA by quite a few years, I found one with similar specs online (Engadget) that originally came bundled with Windows 98 so it may be more along the lines of proprietary limitations which are fairly common for old laptops. Since it’s an old 2.5 laptop drive it probably assumes single drive master, so no drive jumpers are present.

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