computer wont recognize ide drive

[trunolimit]

I've got a Dell 4550 and when I turn on the machine it'll boot up fine but when I turn it off the next time I try to boot it will say primary ide 0 and 1 not found. this happens on both ide0 and ide1 channels. so its a shoot and miss kinda thing where sometimes it will recognize it and sometimes it wont. I've tried 7 different drives, a 30gb ,40gb , and three fairly new 500gb WD drives.

any help would greatly be appreciated thanks.

[tehboris]

IDE cable is broken?

[trunolimit]

IDE cable is broken?

that was my first instinct. (great minds) but just to be sure I just swapped around all the ide cables i have and produced the same results. I did however clear my bios old school style( took out the quarter sized battery and unplugged the power source and waited 2 minutes then plugged everything back in) and I got a message saying my system battery is low. what effect could this have on the system?

the exact message is "alert system voltage is low". it doesn't say battery is low, hmmm what does it mean. May be I'm having power supply issues.

[davmoo]

A dead battery can cause problems with disk recognition. I'd change the batter first and see what happens before I'd change the power supply...simply because batteries are cheaper :)

[burkhartmj]

Also try the hard drives in another computer [multiple times to recreate what's happening on the Dell], though it definitely sounds like a power issue.

I don't THINK it'd be a battery issue, because the battery isn't necessary for anything beyond saving custom BIOS settings. My current desktop doesn't even have a battery, and other than a CMOS error from losing time settings every time there is a power outage, it runs fine.

It's worth testing because it's definitely the cheapest option, but I wouldn't put too much stock in it solving the issue.

[trunolimit]

Alright so I just passed on the problem to my brother. I gave him the computer. I just separated the Hard disk and the cdrom ,1 per ide channel. set the jumpers to master on both and that's it. Hopefully I wont get a call saying there is a problem.