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Dell Bios Doesn't See IDE Hard Disks but Windows 7 Does & Works Fine.
I have Win7 Ultimate installed on a Dell Optiplex GX620 P4 hyperthread, approx 6 years old. Bios is most current Phoenix ROM Bios Plus 1.10 A11. I have 2 sata drives and 2 IDE drives installed. Boot is from SATA 0. SATA drives 2&3 are not present. All is well with this part of the equation.
I had been running a Seagate 250GB IDE drive (ST3250824A) as BIOS drive 4, master drive, jumper selected. I just installed a second 120gb Seagate IDE (ST3120026A) as a slave, BIOS drive 5. That was when things got interesting. When I rebooted BIOS took a long time to load, and then reported that neither IDE drive was present. I then did all the obvious things: Disconnected one drive at a time - BIOS would recognize the connected drive. Switched master & slave drive positions. Changed jumpering from master/slave to cable select. Installed a new ribbon cable. Checked that BIOS drive recognition was set to 'Auto' for both drives. Results are always the same: either drive is recognized when only one is connected but BIOS does not recognize them when both are installed. On boot I receive a warning that IDE Drives 4 & 5 are not present and have to press F1 to continue. When I enter Setup BIOS reports the drives as unknown drive type. When only one is connected BIOS accurately reports the drive model # & capacity.
After going through all this,I decided to bring WIn 7 up and see what would happen. To my surprise, W7 showed both drives and worked fine. Device Manager properly reported drive model & capacity. I have used the system in this configuration for several days and everything has worked fine.
This is not a problem, per se, since other than slow booting and having to press F1 every time I boot to bypass the BIOS "error" notice the system works fine but I am curious if anyone else has had this problem, and if they found a solution. I have considered forcing a reinstall of the BIOS but since it isn't really broken I don't want to try to fix it and make things worse. I googled this problem before coming here and could not find anyone with an identical situation on any tech site. Can I be the only one who's ever had this happen?