"Primary Master Drive Fails"

I searched this site for more information on this problem but didn't really find what I was looking for.

This morning I sat down at my PC to see the "Primary master drive fails" screen up on my computer.

I have some advanced knowledge but am by no means a computer expert, especially when it comes to hardware.

That being said, I have no idea what to do. I don't mind just buying another hard drive but it's been about 6 months since I backed up and there are things I need to get from that HD. There are 2 hd's on this machine but it appears that the primary slave is not showing up. Here is the screen I'm getting:

The biggest thing is I'm hoping that I can get the drive working long enough to get the information from it and then I can purchase another.

Any help would be tremendously appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

 

I would try disconnecting the working drive, connect the apparently broken drive but set as Master rather than slave. Boot the PC with a bootable floppy which has fdisk on it. Then type from the A:\> prompt

fdisk /mbr

This will reset the Master Boot Record and may get the drive working again.

 

It sounds to me like the drive is dead. Try downloading and running the Maxtor drive diagnostic from here: http://www.majorgeeks.com/Maxtor_Powermax_d1386.html
The tip posted above will only work if the drive is FAT32 format. If you're running XP or Win2000, you probably are running NTFS format.

 

Thanks for the info. I flashed the bios by removing the battery for an hour or so. It seems to be working now but I still don't completely trust it. I suppose it's time to start looking into building a new one (which isn't a bad thing).

 

Very true I'm far too used to Win98SE!

The equivalent for XP is to go to the Recovery Console and use the FIXMBR command which is the equivalent of what I suggested above. See here for how to use the Recovery Console.