Auto-Detecting Pri Master - Hard Drive

[clist-1]

A few weeks ago, my BIOS took about a minute to load, then XP loaded
fine. The BIOS did give the message: Auto-Detecting Pri master. I
noticed that my second hard drive was not listed in Windows Explorer.

I did some checking and then reattached the plugs to the hard drive
and had no problems until this morning. I got the same message,
reattached the plugs, no problem.

It's a Maxtor and the device properties says its working properly. Is
this an indication that the hard drive is going to crash soon?

Thanks for any information.

 

[Sjouke Burry]

A few weeks ago, my BIOS took about a minute to load, then XP loaded
fine. The BIOS did give the message: Auto-Detecting Pri master. I
noticed that my second hard drive was not listed in Windows Explorer.

I did some checking and then reattached the plugs to the hard drive
and had no problems until this morning. I got the same message,
reattached the plugs, no problem.

It's a Maxtor and the device properties says its working properly. Is
this an indication that the hard drive is going to crash soon?

Thanks for any information.

It indicates a lousy cable.

 

[Paul]

A few weeks ago, my BIOS took about a minute to load, then XP loaded
fine. The BIOS did give the message: Auto-Detecting Pri master. I
noticed that my second hard drive was not listed in Windows Explorer.

I did some checking and then reattached the plugs to the hard drive
and had no problems until this morning. I got the same message,
reattached the plugs, no problem.

It's a Maxtor and the device properties says its working properly. Is
this an indication that the hard drive is going to crash soon?

Thanks for any information.

You might check the Seagate site, and see if there's a test utility
for the Maxtor. That won't answer the question about whether the drive
problem is purely cable related, perhaps a problem with the motherboard
Southbridge or the power source (onboard regulator) the Southbridge
might be using. But such a utility might be able to tell you whether
other aspects of the drive are in serious trouble.

And having a backup handy, seeing as you've noticed a problem, would
not be a bad idea.

If you have Primary IDE and Secondary IDE connectors on the motherboard,
you can try swapping the drive to the other connector. Or, try swapping
cables, using a different cable to connect up that drive, and see if
there is still a problem.

If the system has PCI slots, perhaps you can pop in a Promise Ultra133
or Ultra100 TX2 to take the IDE drives instead. On the theory it's a
motherboard port issue. Then, you'd need to change the BIOS boot order,
to pick it up. Such cards have their own BIOS code, but the BIOS has
to be set to load that code. The card has two IDE connectors for up
to four drives, and there might be a few of these floating around
used. I have a couple of these in older computers, and as IDE cards
go, they're not bad.

http://ic.tweakimg.net/ext/i/1011195793.jpg

Paul