I am in the process of cannibalizing a Dell Precision 220 and I've run into something that has me stumped. It as two hard drives a 10 GB (logical drive C) and a 250 Gb drive (logical drive E). I have removed the partitions from the 10 Gb drive and erased it. The OS (XP) is on the E drive which is installed as IDE1 and configured to master while the C drive is IDE2, set as slave. When I try to boot the system without the empty drive I get kicked into the BIOS setup which shows no drives at all, including the CD ROM. Since I'm taking it apart you might wonder why I even care. True, I don't really need to know this, but I'd like to understand what is going on.
Hi, you've got your hard drive and cd rom drive on seperate IDE ports/busses and there no need to set the cd drive to slave as it runs on a seperate port/bus. just set both hard drive and cd rom drive to master. Check to see if you've devices are listed in the bios and then select hard drive from the boot priority list. If your devices are still not listed try resetting cmos. see how it goes.
The cd rom is on a separate IDE port from the two hard drives and I have never done anything with it, but when I try to boot the computer without the empty IDE2 drive (logical C) bios does not recognize anything but the floppy drive. As long as the empty C drive is there everything works fine.
I had to change the setting for hard drive 1 to off in the BIOS setup. After that everything works fine.
