BIOS error message

[Lars_Coleman]

What exactly does 'Secondary Hard Disk Fail' message mean?

I have to much conflicting information and wanted to know for sure ....

Thank you

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[HamsterSlayer]

It means that your BIOS was unable to initialize the harddisk on the secondary IDE channel.

The disk is probably connected incorrectly, or maybe the jumper controlling if the disk is master or slave isn't set right.

 

[Lars_Coleman]

The reason for the question is that I thought the same as you, till today. I was troubleshooting an installation of a Quantum Fireball AS 40gig today and I was getting that message at boot up. Come to find out the drive is being recognized in the OS perfect. The partitions are correct and everything including jumpers, BIOS settings, and cable positions. The only thing that I could think that was causing the problem was a BIOS limitation cause its a pretty big drive for the system it was on. It was using the overlay from Maxtor called Ez Bios to see the full capacity within the OS but it seemed the only problem was that the Cd Rom drives wouldn't mount a drive letter. We check the device manager and it shows the drives there telling us that it is assigned to F: and G:. One is a CDRom and the other a CdRw. Cd Rom was a Primary Master and the CdRw a secondary slave.

It was just really weird and I was under the same impression that you are, but I thought I was wrong so I decided to see what everyone here had to say or what their ideas were ..........

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[lhgpoobaa]

"hamsterslayer"?????

eeeeeeks

you leave my hamster alone!
*protects squeaky*

Master PooBaa + Hamster

"i love the smell of Overclocking in the morning!" Says my Hamster.