Dell Bios Doesn't See IDE Hard Disks but Windows 7 Does & Works Fine.

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?

The only time I've found something similar is when I had a CD drive as MASTER on an IDE port and a hard drive as slave. It seems BIOS would inquire or skip on the CD and not bother waiting for a response on the hard drive. Windows would see it fine as by that time, it was spun up, etc. But BIOS never showed it, only the CD drive. Access to hard drive was not a problem.

What happens when you remove the jumpers from both drives?
Hopefully the BIOS will see them. On newer systems, I'm not sure if using jumpers are necessary, but I could be wrong.

If using cable select, are both jumpers set to pins 5 and 6 on the drives?

Sardonicus,

Have tried jumpers set to master/slave (jumper on master, none on slave) and cable select (both jumpers in same position). Not sure of pin numbers but I set them according to the diagrams on the drives. Removing jumpers on both drives would indicate both were slaves, but I guess its worth a try. Will have to wait till I get done resizing partitions on one of the drives to test this out, will get back to you with results. Thanks for the idea.