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Hard Disk Failure

I have just installed a primary slave HDD that has a FAT32 file system. The primary master is NTFS. Both are WD drives. On the first boot the slave was recognized and accessible. On the second boot it was recognized, but when trying to access the drive an error message was recieved that said "This drive is not formatted would you like to format now", I chose NO and rebooted . On this reboot the BIOS screen stated, "primary slave hard drive failure". And the computer hung there for 3-4 minutes. I could hear the hard drive working trying to do something but it never did come up. Any ideas, is the HDD dead , was it in the proccess of dying or does it have something to do with the different file systems. Any help or ideas will be appreciated.
Thanx,
Trapper_earl T

Steve McCarthy, MCSE, MCSA, MCP x8, Network+, i-Net+, A+, CIWA, CCNA, FDLE FCIC, HIPAA Security Officer

It sounds like your drive went south. When you are at the Bios level, the system doesn't really care if it's NTFS or FAT. All it cares about is whether it can talk to the drive on a basic level. If you are getting "Failures" reported at the Bios level, then the system is telling you that it has a problem talking on a hardware level. I would probably reverify that all my jumper settings are correct and my cable and power connections are snug.

You could try to boot with only it in the system to see if indeed the drive has gone south or possibly you are getting a bogus error message with the other drive in the system. While at this level the File Format doesn't really matter, you can still be getting some incompatibilities between drives of different manufacturers, so be sure to check your jumpers on both the slave and master drives.

Good Luck
Steve

trapper_earl

ASKER

Thanx for the reply Steve. I will check the cables and also try the drive as single master when I get backto the shop. Both drives are western digital so I dont think there is an issue there. The jumpers are set on the primary master as "master with slave" and the jumpers on the slave are set at "slave" so I dont think that is an issue. Again I thank you for the input. I will let you know what happens.
Trapper

Steve McCarthy, MCSE, MCSA, MCP x8, Network+, i-Net+, A+, CIWA, CCNA, FDLE FCIC, HIPAA Security Officer

With 2 WD's, it sounds like you have the jumpers right. Try the other as a single and see if you have any luck. Also, on the WD site, they have their own drive diagnostics you can download for free and run it on the drive.

zoidbergman

If you can't get your drive to work, (and you don't intend on using data recovery people), you should throw your hard drive against a brick wall. Then jump on it. Repeat the process when done.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Steve McCarthy, MCSE, MCSA, MCP x8, Network+, i-Net+, A+, CIWA, CCNA, FDLE FCIC, HIPAA Security Officer

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