I assume that you are talking about the BIOS/CMOS not recognizing the 
hard drive and the optical drive.

Some thoughts on possible diagnostics:

Check the cables conditions and secure attachments of the power and data 
cables for the hard and optical drives.

Is the hard drive set as master and the optical drive as slave if on one 
data cable?

Does the hard drive have a formated active partition? If the fdisk and 
format programs are on a floppy disk supplied by the hard drive 
manufacturer, you can use that or obtain one from a computer friend.

Maybe - Check the CMOS battery condition.

The standard model GX240 had a 10 or 20GB hard drive. If you are 
installing a "large" hard drive, the BIOS may need to be updated.

BTW  The standard GX240 came with 128MB of RAM. To satisfactorily run 
XP, you should have at least 512MB or max out the GX240 with 1GB.

Hopefully you will receive more suggestions from others.

Tom

Darrell Dunn wrote:
> I purchased a used dell optiplex gx240 from a government surplus. When I put a hard drive in it, (clean, no OS) It failed to detect the hard drive and CD Drive during system setup. It does however detect the floppy drive. How can I get it to re-detect these drives? If a software program is required, where do I obtain it? Thanks for any help.
>
>
>   

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml