I had a 3 year old dell, and the IDE hard drive died, so I went out and bought a new one at Staples and installed it. Now every time I boot up I get a message saying it found a new hard drive and to press F1. I press F1 and it boots up fine. I also had a 1-year old Dell 8300 with two 250G Maxtor SATA drives and the C drive died. I think a hard drive should last longer than 1 year! So I figured it was still under warranty and I called Dell tech support and got someone from another country. He had me do all kinds of things, but after 96 minutes on the phone I had to let him go. Pressed for time I went out and bought another hard drive 250G Hitachi SATA and installed it and it worked ok. Six months later the new Hitachi died too. Funny thing- the D drive in that computer never died. Anyway I went out and bought another Maxtor SATA drive and installed it and now kinda similar to the older Dell, I get a message that it can't find drive 0 and to press F1. I press F1 and the operating system then boots up fine. I have two questions: 1) I can understand a 3 year old IDE drive dying, but what could be the cause of two rather new SATA drives dying? The first SATA one that died I slaved and it would show a drive letter, but windows couldn't open the drive to let me see the files. When I slaved the Hitachi, I don't even see a drive letter. 2) What am I doing wrong that the bios wants me to press F1 each time it boots in order for it to work? I never went into the bios in the first place.
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