HDD problem

About a week ago, I began getting some errors booting up which seemed to be caused by my secondary HD.



I disconnected it and everything was working fine.



Today has been the first chance I've had to take a look at it. I tried reconnecting the power and IDE cable, but when I start the
machine, the BIOS doesn't recognise any Hard disks.



I've kept the configuration same as befo

1st Hard disk (OS installed) set to Master

2nd Hard disk (mainly used as back-up drive - but with some individual files that are not backed up) set to Slave.



I've tried different configurations, but anything that involves that 2nd hard disk and the PC won't even recognize

the Master.



Is there anything I can try before trashing it to recover some of the files stored on it?



The HD is a Fujitsu and about three-four years old.

One thing you might check (I ran into this problem on a Sony CD-R/RW drive)
is if the troublesome drive might only work as a master (or slave), i.e., it
isn't really able to be the other choice...this can happen if one of the
master/slave select lines is shorted.

"Midnight Moocher" wrote in message
...
About a week ago, I began getting some errors booting up which seemed to
be caused by my secondary HD.



I disconnected it and everything was working fine.



Today has been the first chance I've had to take a look at it. I tried
reconnecting the power and IDE cable, but when I start the
machine, the BIOS doesn't recognise any Hard disks.



I've kept the configuration same as befo

1st Hard disk (OS installed) set to Master

2nd Hard disk (mainly used as back-up drive - but with some individual
files that are not backed up) set to Slave.



I've tried different configurations, but anything that involves that 2nd
hard disk and the PC won't even recognize

the Master.



Is there anything I can try before trashing it to recover some of the
files stored on it?



The HD is a Fujitsu and about three-four years old.