"secondary drive 0 not found"

catalina66

Hiya, got HP DVD writer 1040 a few months back. Installed and been running fine. Suddenly got the "secondary drive 0 not found" message. Had a quick look around the internet, and saw a worrying post saying it could be something fried on the motherboard. I can't comprehend what else it could be ... only thing I've noticed that was occurring, until I formatted about 3 weeks back, was that keyboard was causing powersurge messages. The format wierdly seemed to solve this, but yesterday it happened a couple of times again, only briefly. I'd tried to burn a disk thismorning, it failed and ejected the disk ... drive dead. Had to manually push the drive back in, and no lights/no buttons working, not located in BIOS or in Explorer anywhere. Going to take a look to see if anything looks fried inside the pc, but would really appreciate advice. All I can see about backing up data, and formatting, is a new pc (Littlewoods to the rescue as I can't afford one otherwise!) ... and to right now buy an external USB hard drive? to back up all stuff. Writing a bit fatalistically I realise, lol, but if anyone has any idea what else it could be other than that the motherboard's failing, that would be great news! Plus am worried what else is going to fail, if it is that, so would really appreciate help.

Cheers, Cat

ormus

first thing is to try the drive by installing it on the other ide cable.
ie the main hdd primary ide.
or try it another computer.

catalina66

ormus wrote: »

first thing is to try the drive by installing it on the other ide cable.
ie the main hdd primary ide.
or try it another computer.

thanks ormus, will have a look at that now. Cheers, Cat :beer:

mdbarber

More likely to be just the cd/dvd drive failed, open machine up and pull the two cables off the back of it and restart, you can buy a new one quite cheaply

catalina66

mdbarber wrote: »

More likely to be just the cd/dvd drive failed, open machine up and pull the two cables off the back of it and restart, you can buy a new one quite cheaply

thanks mdbarber, weird thing is it's all working now ... all I did was open the machine, hoover, push to check the cables were sat right (they were) and rebooted. Brief keyboard error (wouldn't work despite plugged in) so rebooted again. Keyboard suddenly working again. Then into windows and AVG came up with virus problem I had no idea I had, which seems the only explanation so far. No idea why AVG didn't find it on all the previous reboots and why the DVD writer 'dying' would make it jump into action! One of those wierd things.

Cheers, Cat

exup

is your psu good enough to power everything - if it was on the limit before it may be being overtaxed now.
you may not see anything if the motherboard is friedn anywhere - its mainly more a figure of speech rather than seeing if theres any blackened components.

Do you have one HDD or two?
how many optical drives do you have.

personally I keep HDD and CD-DVD on seperate ide sockets if I can - but check the other IDE just incase - also can anyone check the drive on their PC ?

catalina66

exup wrote: »

is your psu good enough to power everything - if it was on the limit before it may be being overtaxed now.
you may not see anything if the motherboard is friedn anywhere - its mainly more a figure of speech rather than seeing if theres any blackened components.

Do you have one HDD or two?
how many optical drives do you have.

personally I keep HDD and CD-DVD on seperate ide sockets if I can - but check the other IDE just incase - also can anyone check the drive on their PC ?

hiya and thanks. Yes, psu's okay as I just connected the dvd writer and at the same time disconnected the previous cd drive I'd been using before getting the dvd writer. Got one HDD, no other drives, just the HDD and the dvd writer. They're both on separate sockets.

Cheers, Cat