I have a Dell Dimension L600r with a PIII 600 Mhz processor. I recently upgraded the ram from 64 Mb to 256 Mb. I also removed the 4Gb hard drive and installed a Western Digital 80Gb hard drive. After performing these hardware upgrades I then flashed the bios from A03 to A14 becuase the original A03 bios wouldn't auto detect my new hard drive. After I flashed the bios there was no longer an issue with detecting the hard drive. I then proceed to load Win XP Pro with SP1a. I performed the OS install with no problems. The new drive is set to primary master with the bios detecting it correctly. I then have none selected as slave primary in the bios, and secondary ide master set to the cdrom, and again none selected as the secondary slave. I also have quick boot selected in the bios, with quiet boot disabled. The problem arises after the computer is shut down for any significant amount time (greater then a couple of minutes) and when I go to power the system back up, my computer fails to boot from the hard drive. It instead wants to boot from the floppy disk. If I press cntrl-altl-delete when the prompt to insert a bootable floppy disk comes up, the computer reboots and finds the hard drive, and then continues to boot into Win XP just fine. I wanted to see how the system reacted when I installed the old 4Gb hard drive with WIN98 on it. After I reinstalled the old hard drive, the computer would boot perfect everytime. So do I have a problem with my bios not detecting my hard drive? If so, why does it not find the hard drive on the first boot, but is able to find it on the immediate reboot?

My experience with Dell has been that it doesn't even atempt to detect devices on a CTRL+ALT+DELETE. So I am lost. Though I have heard of a problem with people using 80 IDE cable wrong. (no not 80 pin) Odd thing is that the old one works. So basically I m no help.

I had a similar issue when I installed a 40Gb HDD to a system running WinME (Pentium class machine). I changed the BIOS settings to auto detect to resolve my issue. Hope this helps.