OK, checked inside I got three cables as in the second picture two big and the other one a little smaller, there is another cable and going by my manual the picture looks the same as inside the PC. The manual states this is a Serial ATA Connector.

Will this change cause a problem as I have forked out on a very large bill some months ago and I don't want to fork out again.

By the way were those instructions I were given look OK?

Ok, an IDE cable, such as runs to a hard drive or optical drive, measures about 2" wide. If you were to count the little holes in the connector for this cable it would have 2 rows of 20 pins (40 total). Sometimes one or more of the pins is blocked off.

A floppy cable looks very similar to an IDE cable, but measures 1 3/4" wide. This cable has 2 rows of 17 pins (34 total). Sometimes one or more of the pins is blocked off.

A serial ATA cable is maybe as wide as your little finger (about 1cm wide).

The color of the cables is unimportant, but generally IDE and floppy cables are grey-white, occasionally black, and SATA cables are generally red, but blue or black is common too.

Most Dells's bought in the last..year maybe? no longer have floppy drives internally. Does yours? I ask because it sounds like you have a floppy drive cable, in which case you don't need to disable your onboard floppy drive controller, but rather set it to the correct drive. (3.5" Floppy, 1.44MB). Check that the floppy cable is plugged into the drive (hopefully the right orientation), and that the drive also has power going to it (separate cable, these are 4-wire cable, red black black yellow and you will have wires like this running all over inside your computer).

It also sounds like you have at least two IDE devices in your computer. These can be hard drives and optical drives. Most computers usually only ever have one hard drive, and one optical drive, but 2 optical drives is somewhat common as well.. generally the two optical drives are plugged into the same cable, one in the middle, one on the end. (FYI - by optical drive I mean CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, etc. including burners). Since you brought up RAID, your computer can have more than one hard drive (generally two in this case).

If you can let us know what drives you have and how many of each...(isn't this fun?? :D)

I was thinking about going mad. :lol:

From Belarc Advisor nice little thing shows up all the info.

Drives

159.99 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
114.38 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

PLEXTOR DVDR PX-504A [CD-ROM drive]
SAMSUNG CD-ROM SC-148A
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]
TEAC FD-05PUB USB Device [Floppy drive] <<<<These must be my external floppy drives
TEAC FD-05PUW USB Device [Floppy drive]

MAXTOR STM3160211AS [Hard drive] (160.04 GB) -- drive 0

Do not go mad, it is what Gates wants, then you will end up paying someone else to do the work for you.

I think we have established your HD is a SATA. You got your answer right here. Normally when you count, you would count, 1 - 2 - 3 - 4. Looks like Dell is counting 0 - 1 - 2 - 3. I am convinced that my theroy is right at this point. I would follow the Techy guy's advice and change that setting, it may just fix the problem. 1, 2, 3 need turned off or bypassed and that might do the trick.

Fear Not! If he gave you faulty directions for your motherboard, and what you do does nothing, helps none, and doesnt fix the problem, just reboot, go back into your setup by hitting F2, and change it back.

The above is quite perplexing. You said you do not have an internal floppy drive. Unless you ment that it doesnt work, and its still there, or forgot to mention it being in the front of your computer, this doesnt make much sence.

Other than, what I thought before, the floppy controller was turned off, and went back on by default when your battery died.

It is very hard to hurt your BIOS by changing a setting, you can almost always get back in and reset it to defualt values.

Give it a try and see if that finishes this problem.

Edit: If what the tech told you works, the Drive not found messages should go away, at least for the SATA Devices. Get back to me/us when it does, and We/I will work on your floppy drive with ya.

FAILED

Same message came up followed by a Blue screen warning, restarted and I changed it back and this was followed by a black screen warning about system interrupt restart last best restart or safe mode. Any way I'm back but I am worried the PC will not start the next time I turn on.

If it works OK I will just have to live with this problem, thanks for all your advice and help folks.

I just hope I don't see those screens again.

PS: If I don't drop in on Monday or Tuesday or know its in for repair.

I am sorry to hear that Steed. If you do not want to spend money at the repair shop, you could try Dell again. If you do get this message, would it be possible for you to tell me what type of BIOS you have? It would be top center screen in the setup menu.

Something like:

Award

American Megatrends

PHOENIX BIOS’