My computer was working fine up until yestreday. I have two hard drives, one 60 gb promary and one 40 gb slave. It booted into Windows CP Pro fine, but when I went to access the 2 hard drive (d:\) I got a "The parameter is incorrect" error. I tried chkdisk with all the argumets and it could not check the disk. I shutdown the computer and booted from a boot disk and was able to access the second hard drive from dos. I shutdown again and when I went to boot it up it told me that the Bios could not find any hard drives. I disconnected the slave from the computer and the primary works fine. The primary hard drive now does not work if the slave is attached. Any ideas on a fix or a solution. It is not imperative that I get the data on the second one back, just a convinience. Thanks

Try setting the secondary drive as the only drive using the same cables that work for the primary drive. If the bios will still not detect it, that drive is probably dead. If it is detected as the only drive, it may be your ide cable, power cable or ide controller. Also, make sure that nothing was changed in your bios (ide0 master, ide0 slave both set to match the jumpers- c/s or m/s). Good luck!

The primary slave drive, when put as the primary master, is recognized by the bios, however it will not boot as there is an error of "Primary Master Fail". Also, it takes about 5 minutes for the hard drive to stop spiining and making noises after a boot up. I take it that the hard drive is dead. Could a bad sector on the disk ruin the whole disk? Is there any way to reset the drive (i.e. format it from the bios or anything).

depends on what kind of noise, if it's scratching the surface, like a loud back and forward kind of sound, then it's dead, there's no way of fixing it. no, a bad sector doesn't kill the drive, it could be cause if the connector you connected to the hard drive is the wrong way though. "loud beep" Tim

Spinning along with crunching / grinding noises are signs of mechanical failure. There really is nothing you can do.