Secondary Hard Drive O not Found, strike F1 Key to continue , for Dell system optiples

if just set optimal defaults in BIOS windows are not perhaps on the
drive you try to boot from.BIOS can have changed drive.

Go and press F2 then find Load Default or something similar as each BIOS is different.
If it then loads, change the cmos battery.

when the operating systems was setup on your hard drive, the incorrect partition was set. this causes that screen to appear. more often people will choose that way so that you may have full advantage od a smaller hard drive. this will not affect the performance of the system in any way. the fact that you have to hit the f1 key on startup is just an inconvenience.

If you have a spare working hard drive to test in this computer, swap it out with the existing one. All you have to do is verify that a drive is found during the post. If you get the same message, I would suspect the IDE controller on the motherboard has failed. With the age of the computer (5 years), I would suggest getting a new or used computer to replace it. You may be able to find a replacement motherboard for it, but then to keep it legal with a Windows operating system, you have to locate a motherboard of the same make/model.

Sounds like you have a bad/disconnected Hard Drive and the system is looking for a second boot device (ie: Floppy with a disk) or your primary IDE channel on your motherboard is bad

this means that some drive is there in bios, but its not able to find it. go to the bios menu and check, if its there then disable it and FYI you computer not going to Crash, it will keep function, not finding one drive does not make any difference, just some issue with BIOS configuration.

Hi there.
Sounds like the boot order has been changed in the bios.
The secondary drive sounds like the CD drive as most laptops only come with 1 HDD installed.
Change the boot order to the primary drive by Pressing F1 during startup when the ThinkPad logo is displayed..
Once in the bios change the boot order, save and exit, the computer will restart and boot from the hard drive, when you get into windows check to make sure that the CD rom recognizes CD/DVD's.
Please post back if you need any more help.

Good luck and thanks for using FixYa!!

In your system actually the hard disk is not found because of some loose connection; so you just try to remove your hard disk and then start your pc and shutdown it after 1 minute. and then just attach your hard disk properly.

Check all the cable.

you problem is most likely that your bios is out of date. download the latest bios updates for your motherboard and then when you install windows format you HDD with the ntfs system (using the long formatt system not the quick format). Then you should install the bios update. then your mboard shoud no longer have the problem of recognising your large capacity HDD. thanks

Make sure your HD Cables are all firmly plugged in, and that all drives are starting when you turn on the computer. You can tell with harddrives as they will slightly whine, and have a small, steady vibration to them. If they are all starting, and all cables are fully seated, check in your Setup utility that the drives themselves are Auto-Detect. If none of this fixes your issue, you may have to refer your computer to a computer repair shop.

Hope this helps!

-Backu