I have a Dell Demension 8100 Pentium 4 1.4 ghz system. When I shut down the system , the next time I turn it on , it does not recognize my hard drives and will not boot. After turning off and on a few times, it finally recognizes them and boots normally. This happens sporadically. I have since resorted to not shutting my system down. Rather, I just restart usually once a day. Anyone have any ideas as to what is causing this. My hard drive is brand new , so I know its not that.
Thanks
Dan
Could you tell us specifically what error you are getting on the screen?
Do you have another cable around that you could use to connect the hard drive to the computer to rule that out?
Can you put the hard drive in another tower to check that out or extra hard drive that you could put in your computer and use your new hard drive as a slave to run some tests on it?
Just because a hard drive is new, doesn't mean it's perfect. Probably statistically more likely to fail new out of the box and then again in 5 or 6 years. I had a firewire drive that would only boot sporadically new out of the box and I blamed the operating system and everything else until it just started clicking and died prematurely.
Needless to say, I would backup VERY regularly and consider at least exchanging the hard drive to rule that out.
Let us know what happens.
Before you open her up and start yanking ribbons and hard drives try going into the bios and loading optimized defaults. It worked for me when I had the same problem. Sometimes it can be hard to get into the bios on computers like Gateway and Dell computers. With my Gateway I had to reboot several times hitting F1 at boot up. I eventually got into the bios though.
You have to reset your bios. You can do it with jumper near the bios battery. If you can't find it you can plug out the battery and plug in it again after a couple of hour. If it isn't successful you can flash your bios with utility on the motherboard CD or you can find it on the internet.
