IcemanND

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.

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

Ifyou are only doing this for one machine type with a known config that would work fine, but if you have multiple adapters/configurations it doesn't always work, but the utils will.

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.

What are you trying to do?