Primary drive 1 not found...

I used to have 2 EIDE hard drives in one of our computers (a DELL Dimension 3000) with Windows XP installed on the Master drive C: and Windows 7 installed on the Slave D:

At some point I decided to get rid of XP and re-install W7 on the C: drive, carrying over all important settings from D:, and eventually removing the D: drive to continue with only C:

I never had an issue with booting the machine, but as soon as I would remove the D: drive, thus jumpering the C: drive to "Cable select", the computer would stop at the BIOS logo at any start for like half a minute, and then popping the notorious "Primary drive 1 not found" screen, with the options to strike either the F1 or F2 key.

Once I strike F1 the PC boots normally into W7, and in the BIOS the drive (a WD800JB) is always being recognized correctly.

Again, it did not do that before when the only physical difference was that I ran a slave drive along with it. The master was the identical WD800JB !

Anyone with ideas? It is at least annoying and I'd always like to understand such issues rather than just living with it.

A Guy said:

I'm assuming you currently have only 1 drive (C:\) installed? And it is connected to the primary (master) plug on the cable? Have you tried jumpering the drive to master (single), instead of cable select?

Yes, yes and yes.. master made no difference, unfortunately.

DocBrown said:

You say EIDE HD's but in your specs it says SATA 2 x80 gb, so which kind ?

You may need to run a start up repair 3 times with the win7 DVD to repair the boot files on the single HD.

oh sorry.. the one in my sepcs is my own one, the 3000 is one of two more desktops we have in the family.
How am I doing this with the start up repair. Do I need the DVD for this or can I do it from W7 command line? I can't boot from a DVD though with the 3000.

You need to copy boot files from XP drive to your Win7 drive, before deleting the XP drive.
Than do a startup repair.

TVeblen said:

I am working on a similar problem with someone's Dell Dimension 8100 right now (XP-SP3 cannot load CD-ROM driver).

What I have seen is that the Dell BIOS does not automatically update the IDE configuration, and I see no setting in the BIOS to do so. So if I disconnect the CD-ROM, or put it on a different connection and reboot I get a similar message.

For the Dimension 8100 the trick is to press CTRL-ALT-D during the boot (That is the letter D, not DELETE). This resets the controller for the new configuration. The older 3000 series may do this too. It is important with older Dells to make sure the drives are jumpered on Cable Select, and that may be necessary for this to work.

This Dell Rev.3 BIOS is actually disappointingly simple, it does not even provide an option to set it back to default/setup settings (This was another tip I got to try to fix the problem). I will try the Ctrl-Alt-D maybe it has the same effect.
We have another Dimension 3000 in our household with 1 drive and XP installed, that one does not present this issue. It has a different hard drive though(WD800BB).

theog said:

You need to copy boot files from XP drive to your Win7 drive, before deleting the XP drive.
Than do a startup repair.

Well when XP was replaced by the new W7 installation on C: - with the old W7 inst. on D: - the problem wasn't there yet. In so far it can't be related to XP.

Check all jumper setting & reset BIOS.