Well in my experience, when a motherboard says "Primary master hard disk fail" and you are sure the cables are connected properly it’s usually right. In fact I just went through this with a Western Digital, it did the exact thing yours is doing, first my computer started acting funny, then sometimes when I started it up it would say “NTLDR Is Missing” and then my motherboard said "Primary master hard disk fail" and then it started clicking and died. Poor thing it was only 10 Months old. So we sent it in to WD and they determined it was defective and shipped us a new one and all is well now. Oh, you might want to try this: http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm It’s Maxtor’s diagnostic utility.

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Have the same problem with a 3 year old Maxtor. It's a design flaw or something like that because I know there are more cases. Maxtor only replied that this fault cannot be repaired by software and unfortunately the warranty is gone. That's not nice considering that it's their fault. Next HD WON'T be a Maxtor.

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I solved it. Thanx anyway. I removed the CMOS battery for like an hour and fixed it back. It said CHECKSUM ERROR Defaulkts loaded. Nad it continued with the winxp installtion. Thanks man. With thse having the problem try it and see. NY :> The world is certainly a Very Small Place <<--NaNa Yaw-->>

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My hard disk is also giving the same error. '' Primary master hard diks fail '' and we are not able to rescue the files in the disk. Do you have a bios update programme or a repair programme which can help us to reach the files? Also I do not know why this happen, if anybody knows the reason pls answer. Thanks in advance.. Nestea

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try making sure: 1. The IDE cables are well connected (at primary IDE ) on the motherboard. 2. Check the BIOS to see if the HArd disk is detected and correct cylinders assigned 3. The Hard disk has been set as the active drive (using fdisk) if Fdisk does not detect the HD then.. *** Flash the CMOS battery That is remove the CMOS battery for an HOUR and put it back. This will restore the BIOS settings to the Original. This should work. No data loss Good luck NY :> The world is certainly a Very Small Place <<--NaNa Yaw-->>

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My HD stoped responding and when I try and when I rebooted my system the HD was not detected. I went into the CMOS and tried to see if I did the Auto detect and it did not see the drive. I also went into IDE HDD Auto Detection and nothing came up for the primary HD. Then I went to try HDD Low Level Format and for IDE Primary Master it says None. I have a win98SE boot disk to see if maybe the old windows CD could possibly repair it. But it says no Hard Drive present. Not sure where to go from here. Any advice I would greatly appreciate it.

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I also got the same error. So I tried flashing the cmos battery, and indeed, it worked. I didn't get the error again, but instead, the computer couldn't detect the HD any more. So I rebooted the system, and I get the error again, but the computer could detect the HD.... Before this error, I had two partions on my computer, one for linux and one for windows XP. I tried formatting, and since then I am stocked with this error. has anybody an idea?

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my primary master do not detect my hdd but the secondary detects and runs smooth. checked on Device Manager and it says working properly. Bios auto detect wont. Manually put in values saved and exit bios but wont boot. It finds boot records ok but will not proceed from there. If I connects ide ribbon cable to secondary master it works (i am using that to write this message). I wish I could leave it here but the positions of this drive and the dvd rw drive makes it impossible to use both on the secondary master. Any ideas? joe

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