Potentially a Big Problem. Hard Drive not recognized

[JackieChanIsGOD]

Ok...
I had left kazaa lite on, as i sometimes to, downloading a movie... i went downstairs for 3 hours, came back, and encountered a huge problem.
I message box had appeared on my screen saying something like 'windows failed to delay write to E:/Video/Video Games ...blah blah...' E:/ is my slave hard drive... then at the bottom right, there was a yellow warning message saying something like 'windows failed to delay write to sector something, E:/$80EGsomething like that... blah blah'... i can't remember fully... and the desktop had frozen. So i pressed the reset button on my PC...
When it shut down, it booted up to a power screen with that 'Energy' symbol at the top, and it was "searching for master (i assume hard drive)... then it found "none". Then it searched for "slave" and found "none"... which got me quite scared... then it went to the screen with the memory specs and such on it, and at the bottom it said 'insert BIOS boot disk in A:/'... well, i don't have a BIOS boot disc... my buddy has it...
so i shut down the computer totally... then powered it back up, and everything was back to normal..........

Could someone please shed some light on this situation for me? I'm going to talk to my friend, but i wanna hear more then what he might have to tell me...
Thanks everyone.

 

[Phantasm66]

Well, for a start, try not to post topic like "HELP NEEDED NOW!" or something. "Hard Drive Not Recognised" would have helped.

Open your machine and check IDE and power cables are firmly pressed in on both ends. Sometimes the HDD overheats and pushes these cables out a little.

 

[JackieChanIsGOD]

Oh ok... sorry...
HDDs can overheat?
The cables are fine...
Any other problems it could be?

Could it be the power supply?
Oh, and what file is this E:/$80Esoemthing..... is that the page file? or something temp? cuz it doesn't show up... so i'm thinking it's the page file...
What usually has a dollar sign in it...

 

[SNGX1275]

$ typically is a hidden directory, can be windowsupdate uninstalls, can be "hidden" file shares and there could be other uses. May also be some temp directory a program that was running was using.
I've gotten that error before as well, but computer never locked up cause of it. I haven't seen that error in a long time though and I haven't replaced any harddrives since I saw it last and mine are still running.

 

[Goalie]

My father used to have this problem on his machine as far as drives randomly recognizing/not recognizing, and it was caused by a bad bios battery. Sounds like it shouldn't be connected, I know, but that was the cause. Check your IDE cables, of course, and run a full scandisk/ndd/whatever on your HDs just in case. If one drive comes up with a lot of hosed sectors, you know the likely cause.

The power supply could indeed be a cause if it were close to death and not outputting a constant stream, but I'd save this conclusion until you see other evidence (typically random powerdowns, screen flickers, etc.).

Hope this helps somehow, and good luck!