Dell Optiplex Gx620 Hard Drive Removal

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Athina Dollison

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Aug 3, 2024, 11:51:16 AM8/3/24

to chrisobibun

I agree, could be the video card. Although I have had a couple 620 motherboards go out. Is it out of warranty? If not pop up on the Dell support chat and give them the error message. They should* be able to tell you what it is.

That error code point to HDD/OS not seen. Try a known good hard drive. If that fails with the same error code its a controler failure on the MB or a failure of the hard drive data cable. This is not posted on Dells website but every Dell tech knows it. Also see:

Another thing that can cause that model it fail on bootup is bad capacitors on the motherboard. Bad caps will cause the machine to not boot, have intermittent lockups and other odd things. We have repaired many motherboards for clients with this problem. There is a full post on our web site about this know issue at: -la.com/blog/index.php/dell-optiplex-gx620-motherboard-repair/

I have two Seagate barracuda 7200.10 500 GB drives pulled from an old Lacie Big Disk Extreme. I have been using them both in a Dell Dimension 4600 in a master slave configuration, (one by default has a jumper as master and the other has no jumper as a slave. This is confirmed by this article)

I inherited an Optiplex gx620 and was attempting to set up the same configuration, but I have been having difficulties. When each drive is connected separately as master, they are detected and work perfectly. However, when connected in a Master/Slave relationship, neither are detected. This machine is equipped with the "cable select" feature, so I attempted that jumper configuration on the drives, but I had the exact same result. I have tried 3 different cables and nothing makes any difference.

Additionally, it should be noted that the PATA cable was originally connected to a DVD drive, and I'm reasonably sure that the original harddrive was on SATA with no PATA hd at all. I have changed the settings in the bios (A11) to disable all SATA, and enabled the two PATA connections.

Update: For my own sanity, I plugged both drives back into the original dimension 4600 and configured them as Master/Slave on a single IDE connector. Both drives were recognized and booted fine. I moved the exact same setup over to the new computer and it still didn't work. As a result, I'm inclined to believe this is a problem with the motherboard or BIOS.

I have seen old IDE drives misbehave with jumper settings that should work. Cycle through all the possible settings on each of the drives: master/slave, master/CS, Slave/CS. Some drives have a master setting which is Master ONLY (no other drives allowed) and another jumper with master w/slave.

First confirm that the hard drives do not require different jumper settings for "Single/Master" and "Master with Slave Present." (Although in my experience, Seagate drives only have a single jumper setting for both cases.)

Make sure you don't have the cable plugged in backwards (i.e., with the wrong end plugged into the motherboard). The side of the cable with a red stripe should align with pin 1 of each connected device. The cable's connectors themselves also typically have an arrow pointing at pin 1.

It is also possible that the slave is disabled in the BIOS. Check the BIOS settings to confirm that none of the interfaces are set to "Disabled." For the Optiplex GX610, you'll need to go to the Drives menu and make sure Drive 0, Drive 1, etc., are not disabled.