HDDs won't detect on reboot

[bufftron]

Greetings fellow I.T. folk,

I have an old Dell GX260 running windows XP. The primary IDE channel has 2 IDE HDDs. The secondary IDE is a single IDE HDD and a CD-ROM.

The hardrives on the primary IDE channel fail to detect on reboot/restart.

"Primary hard disk drive 0 not found"

"Primary hard disk drive 1 not found"

"Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility"

At this point, Ctrl+Alt+Del will restart the PC, which then boots without the error.

Oddly enough, when powering down completely and powering back up, no problem. The issue only occurs upon restarting.

Also I might mention the Dell logo screen hangs for an unusual amount of time.

Event Viewer reports a "paging fault" on one of the drives, but I doubted the issues were related.

Any ideas?

Regards,

Paul

[bonestonne]

replace the PATA cable on both channels with 80 conductor cables.

PATA cables can go bad and cause issues like that.

[puntoMX]

Also the motherboard is known for bad capacitors and a faulty Southbridge...

[Ponch]

As odd as it can seem, this kind of problem can also be caused by a (video) driver. Please don't laugh, it's true.

[ripken204]

its almost sound as if you should get a new computer.. but try replacing the cables first.

[bufftron]

Thanks for the responses.

Tried swapping out the cables. No dice. Same error.

Maybe if I tossed it in the dumpster, the error would stop?

[bonestonne]

some people like me would stop by, take it, fix it and use it. you should see the Everex PC3500G i have upstairs...a couple hours cleaning the viruses off vista, and it works like new (although now it's got a few upgrades and it's running ubuntu).

it could very simply be an issue with the hard drive...you could always replace that if the computer is really worth something to you, otherwise i'd take the hard drives out, and then leave it for donation or a cheap buy locally for someone with a drive who wants to take a swing at it...the joys of listing things as "As is"....

[RJARRRPCGP]

May be a loose Molex connector.

[Ponch]

Has this always happened ? Have you checked the jumpers ?