Advice Please - Pri slave, not detected

alison74

Tried to boot my PC up tonight, windows XP home edition and it's coming up with pri slave ........ not detected and then does nothing else.

I have my friends' lap top at the moment and am using that to try and gain info on how to fix it. Other forums have mentioned windows XP repair disk, but I dont know what I am doing.

Can someone explain in layman's terms what the problem might be ? If it's the hard drive that's goosed, then please tell me, but it's only 1 year old (the hard drive). Computer is 2years old.

It also sometimes says reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot advice and press a key

Nothing new was installed or un installed but it has been getting noticeably slower over the last few weeks. Everything backed up apart from some photos

Thanks in advance

Taffybiker

Your hard drive should be the Primary Master. A slave will be either a 2nd hard drive or a CD/DVD drive. It is also possible the PC is looking for a drive that does not exist.
Enter the BIOS, and switch off primary slave. Your system should boot then. You can usually enter the BIOS by pressing F2 or DEL during start up, depending on your machine.

alison74

Thanks for the advice, but I am lost after BIOS. I do have 2 hard drives though, windows is on C: and I have a for all my media

Maximillion

BIOS is the basic info your computer uses when sarting up telling it where to find the operating system etc. As taffy biker says you can usually acces this by pressing one of the function keys (eg F8 or F2. depends on your machine When you switch the machine before you see the "windows" screens there is often a message telling you what to press for "system setup" or similar text)
if you can press the right key before you get the error you can access the BIOS info and it will be fairly easy to follow...

Taffybiker

I suspect you may have a problem with drive D then. Perhaps you can check connections to it, or remove/disconnect it.

alison74

Will just go in and check everything is tight etc just now - thanks !

totalsolutions

Sorry, checking everything is tight is not what you have been asked / need to do. Remove the power / data cables and re-connect, please.

totalsolutions

>Your hard drive should be the Primary Master

not quite correct, as long as it is on a partition, might be "C" or "D" or any other letter as long as it is Primary bootable, active volume.

Taffybiker

Very true, though I have yet to come across a [single] operating system not installed on a Primary Master drive.

closed

As has already been suggested, disable the primary slave in the bios - do you have 2 physical hard disks, or 1 hard disk with 2 partitions?