Hey guys, my mate brought his PC over last week stating that on boot-up it hung on 'detecting primary slave drive'... So without touching anything I turned it on and it worked! However the same problem has occured since then, and I suggested he brought it back to me... Well he left it down last night, and this morning and turned it on, only to see 'detecting primary slave drive'; I hit reset and the computer booted into windows 98 (safe mode)... I ran scandisk on the C: drive (no other partitions on the 40GB Fujitus drive) and around 1/3 through the system restarted, only to again hang on 'detecting primary slave drive'... So I changed the cables, tried it in two different PC's, set it as master/slave/cable select etc; and the same problem each time. On one occasion it said no boot sector found on primary disk I am pretty sure there is no power getting to the hardisk, has it died? He is extremely worried as he has the disk full of his own DJ music, any ideas or is it borked? Or has the boot sector gone? I did a boot from win98 floppy, and then ran a Fujitsu diagnostic program, only for it to state 'could not find a primary slave disk' HELP!!!!
It could be so many things, if i were you i'd remove the drive and put it in another system (as the slave) see if you can access it that way, back up the important files then run some diagnostic programs on it (such as Start -> Run -> chkdsk x: /f (where x is the letter of the drive)) then once thats done, put it back in the original computer and try it again.
check with a harddrive utility, i know u already have tested it. this may sound adrubt but give it a jolt/shake. dont get too far though then shove it back in then backup the harddrive up asap on urs or another hdd. the reason this is happening is the harddrive is literally packaging up i have got 2 harddrives 10GB,13gb that have done this what size and make is ur mates one?
Tried on two different machines to set as master or slave and again 'detecting primary/slave drive'... Fujitsu 40Gb
If it's not dead it's dying. Try until you can boot one more time (hope you can) then backup as much as you can. G luck!
Wow! Got it booted from win98 bootdisk, and I am currently running scandisk from the floppy... Fingers crossed!
Its on its last legs... It randomly is 'not detected' by windows on boot-up; and when it is detected and I try to copy some of the files, it just dies again... Strange though, because it seems I have to leave it 'off' awhile before it will be detected again, could the heat be affecting it? The drive itself is extraordinarily hot!
keeping a drive cool is good practice for long life, however that might just be a sign of the fault it is having, try and give it some cooling, its worth a try.
Could be it, not entirely sure why it'd just start getting to hot, unless part of the circuitry's dodgy.
it's that important? stick it in the freezer for a couple of hours, plug it back in and see what you can pull off
Yeah Lucifer, my mate is a well known DJ in Ireland and his computer has three years worth of self created samples, midi files, .wavs, QuBase stuff etc... Its his living basically!
I hate to say this but its his living and he didnt make back-ups ? Boot into dos from a bootdisc and try to copy the files that way to another HDD, that might work. Going all the way into windows from that drive may be putting it under too much strain for a semi-borked HDD.
Tried that hippo, I think the reading ability of the hardisk is dead, so hopefully the platter should not have been damaged... Got a quote from OnTrack, £76 for diagnosis (list of retrievable files) and then between £360 - £760 for the retrieval... He will now know BACKUP is essential...
