My journey started with a PowerEdge 400SC rig my sister purchased under my advisement a while back. The problem with this machine is that it came with two IDE devices hooked up in the master positions of IDE 1 and IDE 2, and I wanted to add another HD.

A cinch right? No, if you connect up any IDE device as a slave the BIOS ignores it. If you disconnect the IDE cables from the motherboard, the BIOS still believes there are two devices hooked up in the master positions just that they aren't "recognized." As was hinted at on the dell forums from a professional technician/server admin who hit the same wall it turns out you have to reset the CMOS (via an undocumented jumper) and boot with the drives in position so that the BIOS can go through its auto-configuration run, and no you can't do this in the BIOS.

This is a stupid problem on a machine that was supposedly meant as a server, something which you would expect to have more hardware changes than on a normal user's machine. And I'm on the 10th (newest) edition of the BIOS, and this issue hasn't been caught yet?



This really made me start to wonder about the quality of dell machines in general if they let something like this slip past. After some searching I came up with some sites talking about absolutely hellish tech support, and quite a few of them. Here are some of them:



Two well written stories from the same person, with links to others.
http://replays.blogspot.com/

A looong list of consumer complaints.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/computers/dell_svc.html

A not so well written, or organized site, but it does contain quite bit of information and many complaints.
http://www.computergripes.com/Dell.html




My god this is awful crap.

Gotta say it'll be a cold day in hell before I recommend dell to any family or friends who look to me for computer info.