I am working on a pc where at start up, it says "secondary drive 0 not found and secondary drive 1 not found... Press f1 to continue or f2 to go to setup. F1 takes me to windows(with no cdrom or dvd rom available), f2 takes me to the setup where it does not have any secondary devices installed. I have tried all that I can think of and find on the internet, but the device manager still shows no cd rom or dvd. I am not sure exactly what hardware or software changes occurred since it is not my pc. I have checked the DMA settings to see if they were switched to PIO and they were not. I have also cleared the windows paging file. I do know from what I have read, it seems to happen frequently in Dell's. Any help would be appreciated.

Have you done anything inside the case? made any changes? Possibly the IDE cable got knocked loose or if you changed or added drives, you may have the master/slave jumpers set incorrectly. Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @ 8.5 x 200MHz 768MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7 Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro

It's most likely an error in plugging Master/Slave or a cabling error. If there are two drives, try one at a time and make sure it's cabled correctly.

thanks for the replies, but I have checked the cables and jumpers. I even switched cables. Please help!

Maybe I should take it for granted I guess - but you didn't seem to mention that you had gone into the BIOS Setup to see if the drives are being detected or not. You might be able to enable them if they are detected there in the BIOS, with the Exit & Save. But maybe secondary is automatically detected at the boot/startup anyway, I can't remember what happened when I installed my CD-ROM a couple of years ago! Going into the BIOS just might get things kick started again - it is just another machine isn't it!! It sounds like you just aquired this PC, so you could 'follow' the cords from plug to plug just to make sure everything is where it should be & secured properly too. I mean, you're right! The sucker should be working - if the cords are A-OK. Two drives just don't stop working at the same time do they. Good Luck!