please help - 'dos' warning then hard drive disapeared!

23rdspiral

hi, my computer was fine this morning.
when i turned it on this evening, a 'dos' type message said:

"IDE Chanel 1 slave hard disk S.M.A.R.T status bad
warning= imediate backup your data + replace your hard disk.
A failure may be imminent."

obviously i was worried. i checked the dos menuthingy, and it said correctly that my Master was 80gig, my secondary was 10gig, and my secondary slave was 20gig.

I exited dos menuthingy and windows started. I was going to do the backup it suggested but could not = only my 80gig primary harddrive showed up in 'my computer'. I know a bit, but have no idea why this has happened or what to do next. I turned the computer off and tried not to pannic. (I'm typing this on the OH's computer.) I have Kaspersky and run AVG regulary.

Can anyone help?

cooltt

Hello
One of your hard drives has failed, open pc, disconnect secondary & secondary slave. Just disconnect their little power leads (white plastic with 5-6 coloured wires going into it) be carefull not to touch anything else. PC should be turned off but plugged in to earth it (not the correct way i know but fine as long as your careful) then restart your pc. If it starts up fine then your Master drive (80gb) is fine, now reconnect another with pc turned off, if starts fine then it's not them two drives so must be the one that's still disconnected.
SMART is the BIOS monitoring programme to make sure the guts of your pc don't over heat or fail etc...shuts the pc down to protect all other components that are working fine.

macman

How many physical hard drives have you got-are the 10 and 20GB drives just partitions of the main drive?
I'm presuming that if you've got 2 or 3 physical drives then you've already got a backup of your data?
If you can boot up again from the master drive then it sounds like only your secondary drive has failed and your OS should be OK.
Operating system?

23rdspiral

Hi both, thank you for your help and advice.

Sorry, I should have explained better. They are 3 different hard drives Primary master runs the operating system and photos ect, then of the 2 smaller ones 1 backsup photos and 1 holds itunes. The very odd thing is that the 'primary slave' that Dos said had issues is actually my CD rom?!

I started to follow cooltt's instructions and had a general look around at the same time. I noticed the big wide grey cable between the secondary hard drives and the motherboard was a bit wobbly, so i pushed it firmly in and tired the computer again. and much to my delight and surprise, 'My Computer' showed all 3 hard drives again!!! (and the CD rom is still working.)

I've no idea how the cable became loose, as all was totally fine earlier in the day. Anyway, i've now plugged in the OH's external hard drive and am cautiously backing everything up in case it wasnt just a cable problem...

Thank you for your help!!

-TangleFoot-

23rdspiral wrote: »

The very odd thing is that the 'primary slave' that Dos said had issues is actually my CD rom?!

Actually, it was referring to the secondary slave. Your primary slave would be situated on IDE Channel 0. If you're still worried about it, check the drive's vital statistics using something like HD Tune.