I put a new hard disk in a dell 4600i but the computer can find the disk?

Question

can some body help with this problem

Answer 1

Double check the cables, make sure the drive has power. Does it spin up when you turn the power on to your system? Also, is this drive connected as a 2nd hard disk, or is it replacing one that went bad? The 4600i is a fairly recent model, so it should be able to recognize most hard drives.

When you first power on the system, go into SETUP (usually by hitting or F10 as soon as you hear the beep, before Windows loads), and check your new drive is detected. If SETUP sees the drive, you're fine. You'll just have to format it before you can use it. If the drive is not detected in setup, you've got a hardware problem (possibly a bad drive, or something simple like a cable not connected properly)

Answer 2

Sounds like a simple fix. First, did you recheck the cables to make sure they are plugged in solidly, both the power and data cables. When you start the computer up you should here the hard drive spin up.

Second because it is a Dell, they love to use the Cable Select (CS) option on the hard drive jumper. If you try to use master or slave it may not find the drive. make sure the jumper on the hard drive is set for CS, teh actual pin config for this this varies according to hard drive manufacturers. (check links below)

Also you may have to have change the BIOS if the hard drive is a additional drive not the primary. Dell usually disables the unused channels when they build the systems.

Below are a couple of links to hard drive sites for the jumpers settings.