Primary IDE failure? help!

J

julian1982

New member
hey all, my 30 gig hard drive has simply stopped being recognized by windows ME.

~

system properties -> device manager -> disk drives

'disk drive' has a red X through it. when i click on it's properties it says

"this device is not working properly because a device it depends on, Primary IDE controller (dual fifo), has been dynamically disabled."

under 'hard disk controllers' it has a yellow ! next to Primary IDE controller (dual fifo), so i click on it's properties and it says

'this device is either not present, not working properly, or does not have all the drivers installed (code 10). try upgrading the device drivers for this device'

this makes no sense because i think the primary drive is the 4 gig drive which has the operating system on it, and it's the 30 gig drive (used only for audio) that isn't recognized by windows. it's recognized by bios because it says that it's there when the computer is booting up, so it's not a lose cable or anything like that. i just can't access it from windows. im running windows ME...... and Fdisk doesn't recognize it either.

please help! what's wrong? i hadn't touched the inside of the computer or changed any settings on the computer or anything like that, the second hard disk (which i need!) simply stopped being recognized by windows. it's done this before and after a week it started working again without me changing anything, but this time it's been about 2 weeks and still no change.

any advice????
 
same

Under 'hard disk controllers' i have :

ALi M5229 PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
(!) Primary IDE controller (dual fifo)
Secondary IDE controller

I couldn't remove the Primary IDE controller, it said I had to remove the ALi controller so I removed it and rebooted and it didn't bring back the other hard drive. There's still a red X through 'disk drive'.

I'm pretty sure this is how it goes:

Drive C = Primary master
Drive D = Primary slave (not being recognized by windows me)
CDROM = Secondary master

So....what's going on? :(
 
it is possible that the physical IDE controller on the motherboard has fried....

I had this happen with a computer a few years back....but it was my primary controller that went bad...so I couldn't even boot up!!

if this is the case, you could get a PCI IDE controller card and hook up your secondary drive through that....
 
OK - so the drive that's not working is a slave on the same IDE channel as the drive that is working. I doubt it's the ide controller. It could be something as simple as the IDE cable having come unplugged a bit. Also try using a different IDE cable - the things do go bad every now and again. You could also try making the non-working drive a slave (or master) on the 2nd IDE channel (the one your CD-Rom is on) to try to work out if it's the drive that has failed or something else.
 
It sounds like the IDE controller on the motherboard could be going. Mine did just last week. For about a month it would do weird things. I have a CD-rom plus a CD-RW. Sometimes after booting, the CD-rom would not even be listed in the device manager. Then the next time it would. Later on, the entire computer would stop working, like all the signals to the drives, (hard drive, floppy, CD-roms) just stopped. But the fans and lights would be working, so it had power. We found it was heat related. If we took the case off and let it cool down, I could re-boot. Putting the case back on and waiting for 20 minutes and the heat would build up and everything would go down again. My husband swapped out the motherboard for a new one and everything has been fine (knock on wood).
 
mikedaul said:
OK - so the drive that's not working is a slave on the same IDE channel as the drive that is working. I doubt it's the ide controller. It could be something as simple as the IDE cable having come unplugged a bit. Also try using a different IDE cable - the things do go bad every now and again. You could also try making the non-working drive a slave (or master) on the 2nd IDE channel (the one your CD-Rom is on) to try to work out if it's the drive that has failed or something else.
Click to expand...

Good advice. Just add that rather than messing with jumpers just unplug your CD-ROM temporarily and attach the questionable drive. You may need to go into BIOS and set the secondary master and slave to 'AUTO'. If the two hard drives really are on the same ribbon then it's possible the 30GB has died. Still not impossible that it is a flaky controller.

Did you ever see this error message 'primary IDE failure' in your subject post? I'm just wondering if this isn't just a windows screwup. Have you booted off of a windows boot disk and tried to read the files on the 30GB?

Give mikedauls suggestions a try.
 
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