Primary Master Failure

[fragusmaximus]

I got a call recently from a friend experiencing a whole host of problems with his 4 year old hard drives. Yep both hard drives yet each one has a different problem (or so I expect).

He says his first drive is producing a whirring or zipping sound.

His second drive is connected to his primary ide bus as a slave. He also has a CD burner set as master on that bus. When he boots, he gets the message HDD Primary Master Failure, press F1 to continue (I don't know the exact quote). When he presses F1 to continue, his system complains resulting in an abort,retry,fail message. This problem seems to be intermediate. Sometimes (not often) he can get his system to boot.

Has anyone experienced these problems? Does anyone have any advice?
Thanks in advance.

 

[mechBgon]

Is that an old Dell or some such? My advice, at any rate, is to have him back up any important data before it's too late, then consider having a new hard drive installed. Sorry if that's way too obvious

 

[fragusmaximus]

No, this system isn't a namebrand. I had a hand in building this machine from components about four and a half years ago. I am not sure what he has done with the components, but I know one of the drives was a Western Digital.

He is overclocking his system, but he's been doing it very slowly. His last bump up was probably six months ago.

Keep the replys comming. Anything would be helpful.

 

[amdskip]

The hard drive is almost dead. They don't last forever because they have moving parts, etc. and stuff just wears out after so long. Backup and replace is your solution.

 

[fragusmaximus]

Yeah I figured they were or are dying drives. It's rather odd that both drives would die in the same weekend though.

Anyway, if you think it's a dead drive, could I then ask this group for recommendations? Where could I send a dead drive to get its data retrieved. Anyone know of reputable places that won't charge an arm and a leg? Cheaper is better but I think I would put a limit at $200 (u.s.).

 

[Sephiroth]

If you're lucky, just hooking it up as a Slave on another system would let you retreive stuff.

One of my hd's died. I had it sit around for a while and then a friend told me about this. I popped it in, and it read everything. When I tried to boot with it, it wouldn't get recognized.

So it may work as a slave.