Primary master drive fails

[JohnAW]

I recently built a new comouter with the following hardware:
asus a7v600 mobo
AMD athlon xp2900
WD 80gb SATA
ATI Radeon 9200 All in wonder
LG DVD rw
Mad Dog CD rw
1gb ram

I turned it on went into BIOS and entered settings for hard drive, exited BIOS, mem test ok, initialized PNP, detected secondary master(CD-RW) but not secondary slave(DVD-RW) and I got the following message - primary master drive fails. What should I do? I bought all hardware online as OEM so I have no software and documentation.

 

[MrGaribaldi]

:wave: Hello & Welcome to TechSpot :wave:

Have you installed the OS on the drive, or haven't you come that far yet?

Since you're using a SATA disk, there won't be a primary master (unless you hook up the optical drives on that channel), so it would seem the bios is getting confused.
In the bios there should be an option to select the order of booting. Set the SATA drive second (the optical first so you can install the os), then go and disable the primary IDE controller (or put the opticals on it).

now you should be able to boot with a cd, and install your os. Just remember to hit "F6" when prompted, as you most likely will have to install 3rd party drivers for your SATA controller.

 

[JohnAW]

It seems as though the hard drive is dead. My friend brought over his WD1200jd SATA HD and it worked fine. We couldn't detect any noise or vibration from mine. Thanks for replying.

 

[MrGaribaldi]

Well, then it would seem you'll have to get an RMA and return the drive for a working one.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help, but you seems to have figured it out yourself which is good (although the diagnosis wasn't much fun)...

 

[miketoloo]

primary master hard disk fail

primary master hard disk fail and also secondary master hard disk fail error mnessage mean:
Possible casue of these error messages is a faulty controller (Electronically faulty/damaged hard disk drive). Sometimes a well written software recovery program can access the data, but in most cases the hard disk requires a hardware recovery, meaning it has to be opened in a clean room lab and attempt to recover the data.