Dimention 3000

[The compooper dude guy]

I found this ancient computer in my basement, and tried to see if it worked. It did, but just recently I pulled the RAM out, and the hard drive, and replaced the ram, not the hard drive, and booted it up, after connecting everything up again. On BIOS, it says, "no boot device available." So I pressed F2, and looked at the boot sequence. It said there was no hard drive, and the computer was trying to boot from the CD/ROM. I made sure the hard drive was connected, and booted it up again. It did the same thing. (the computer is running BIOS AO2, in case anyone needs to know.) I'm stumped.

[Nick H. Supervisor]

Just to be 100% sure, when you go in to the boot menu you have moved the HDD to the top of the list, right? And yet it still tries to go to the CD ROM first?

[DrunknMunky Veteran]

When you disconnected the hard drive, did you do so from the motherboard or from the hard drive side of the cable? Ensure both ends of the cable are securely in place and ensure the power cable is attached properly to the PSU.

 

Can you hear it spin up at all when you power on the PC?

 

Also, some mobos will require the boot drive to be attached via a designated port. Did you reconnect to the same port when you re-installed the HDD?

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

 

Given the computer is probably around 14 years old at this point, it may be necessary to replace the CR-2032 coin cell which acts as a back up its CMOS/RTC memory.

 

Once you've got that done, make sure the hard disk drive is connected correctly, as @Andrew noted, and then plug the computer back into an AC outlet and apply power to the system.  What happens now?

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

[+Warwagon MVC]

First go into the bios F2 and see if the drive is even being detected. If not check to make sure the primary isn't disabled.

[trek]

HD is probably connected by an IDE cable shared with the CD Rom drive. Make sure you set the jumpers master/slave on both according to their positions on the cable.