Ray said:
Recently, while booting up Windows XP Pro, from time to time, I got a
warning message: Primary slave drive fails. I need to re-boot it
again to
boot up successfully. It appears to me that it is a signal to say the
harddisk is going to fail. Can someone advise me how to easily
replace the hard drive without reinstalling the OS and application
programs.
Thanks,
Ray
What is on the slave drive? If you only have data on the slave drive and
the operating system/applications are on the master, then just back up
the data on the slave (which you should be doing regularly anyway) and
replace it. You don't need to do anything else. If you installed
programs onto the slave drive, uninstall them first and then reinstall
them onto the new hard drive.
Things to check to make sure the slave drive is really at fault, doing
one thing at a time and testing after each change:
1. Run a hard drive diagnostic on the slave with a utility downloaded
from the drive mftr.'s website. You will make either a bootable floppy
or bootable cd with the file you download. Boot with that media and do
a thorough test. If the drive fails with any physical errors, you know
you need to replace it.
2. If the drive doesn't show any physical errors, first try swapping out
the ribbon cable for a known-working one.
3. If that doesn't help, attach the slave to IDE0 (assuming it is IDE)
or another connector if SATA. In older machines it is quite common for
the secondary IDE connector to fail as the motherboard begins to die.
Malke
