I have an old Dell Optiplex Gx-100 that I basically just use as a wireless print server. The problem is: it will not recognize any of my drives. I tured the computer on the other morning and as it was booting up, I got a message "Primary drive 0 not found. Press F1 to reboot or F2 to enter setup:. I went into setup, and none of my drives (hardrive, and cd drive are shown as "not found". The select feature for both is set to "auto", so why all of a sudden does it not recognize the drives? When I go into the "boot sequence", the only drive on the list is the 3.5 floppy. What happened to my other drives?

Check the BIOS to see that both IDE controllers are Enabled. If both HD and CD are on the same cable, that controller may have died. Try plugging into the other one.

To add to the above response I forgot to mention that if one of two drives on a cable together dies it can affect both. Try configuring the HDrive alone with the correct jumper settings. Then try the CD alone with a bootable cD in place and the boot order set for CD before HDrive. This may determine if one of the drives is defective.

Take proper static precautions and unplug from the wall.

IDE controllers are on. The hard drive and cdrom are on seperate cables, and neither one is recognized. Tried switching them..no change. Tried just the cdrom with a bootable cd...nothing. Does this sound like the mother board?

You could try changing the settings in the BIOS to diabled and then back to Auto. Also may have a force detection option in the BIOS. Possibly on the same screen as the drive info.

I've disabled and back to auto several times already without any change. Didn't see any force detection options. Like I said, everything was working perfectly, then nothing. Oh well.

Well, I switched out mobos and still have the same problem. What am I missing? Is it possible to have to ide cables go bad at the same time?

If you had a power surge any or all components may be bad. Check the drives on a different system, if possible. If the MBoard you swapped out is a known good one then the drives may be both dead. I might be hard to tell if a harddrive is getting power but optical drives are easy. Is the tray operating as it should? Your PSU may have gone out on you.

After taking the cd drive and hard drive and switching them into a known good system, they both operated fine. So then I tried the ide cables on a know good system. Guess what, both cables were bad. I replaced those put everything back together (using the new mobo) and everything worked fine. The curiosity go the best of me then, so I put the old mobo back in and got nothing again. So my conclusion is I had a bad mobo as well 2 bad ide cables. Not sure how that happened, but everything is working well now. THANKS for all the advise !!!!!