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driver / bios setting problems

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Post #1
hello. i have a four year old dell dimension 8400 running xp. a while back, everytime i start up my computer, i got the following error message: "disk 1 not found : serial ata, sata-1". f1 starts the computer up, f2 sends me to the bios. on another website, someone suggested changing the settings of the drives on the bios (turning drives 0-5 on or off depending on whether SATA or PATA were displayed). i tried that, but it didn't help. i went to my manufacturer's website, dell support, and they had me install their latest bios version and go the the bios. the dell support folks assured me that the problem would go away when i exited the bios, saying updated bios will reset the drives correctly. the problem hasn't gone away. now, after the error message and the f1/f2 options i described above, i often get a blue screen error message saying i may have to disable a drive and my computer's using too much memory, also that i may have to update my bios and disable caching or memory options. do you have an idea of what's wrong with my computer? will manually changing the drive settings in my bios help? thanks so much for your time. helpme78
Post #2 last edited
Is your box configured with a Raid array by any chance, if so there maybe settings in the bios which were reset to factory defaults which may need to be changed, you may need to reinable raid and reinstall your raid drivers. If it was Raid 0 you may have data recovery problems :(
Post #3
hi, thanks for the feedback. i should have mentioned, i'm not terribly tech-savvy. i'm not sure what the raid array is, and i don't know how to reinable raid and reinstall raid drivers. i did see that, in the bios, under the drive section, the last field is "SATA operation", where there's four fields: 1) raid autodetect/ahci 2) raid autodetect ata 3) raid on 4) combo at this moment, the setting is on the first field, raid autodetect/ahci. does this indicate anything? would you be able to explain how i can reinable raid and reinstall my raid drivers? is it difficult? i really appreciate any help you can provide. thanks!
Post #4
On some dell machines autodetect/ahci can cause blue screens if it was running in ide mode so try raid autodetect ata , I hope this helps :)

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