An easy way to find out which drive is the primary slave?

jem16

I'm getting an error on boot up;

"Smart failure predicted on primary slave. Back up and replace"

Is there an easy way from within Windows XP Pro to see which drive is which?

Is this error basically telling me that I have a HDD about to fail or could it be something else?

PierceUK

Its a warning telling you to back up and replace your main (primary) drive. normally you only have one which is still called the primary.

althought the SMART error could mean it wil still last a few months or years its best to back up ALL you stuff now and start saving for a new drive

albertross_2

probably your d: drive..

do you have 2 hard disks, or one and a DVD/CD drive?

jem16

I have 3 hard drives.

culpepper

usually the master is the bootable drive and the slave would be the second disc installed on the same IDE cable.
When you boot up ,the black screen shows info about your Hard drives and has Master drive IDE1
Slave drive IDE1
Master drive IDE2
Slave drive IDE2
this includes optical drives DVD and CD
and info about the size of each and the make.
That may help.
The easiest way though would be to look in the back and see which ones are plugged into IDE 1 (sometimes coloured blue) .Then you know its not the one with only one hard drive on it and its not the bootable one(usually) so it must be the other one.

ichiban1962

boot up your pc keep pressing either delete,F1 or F2 to enter bios
select the first heading (normally titled main)
this screen will give you a listing of hard drives,dvd/cd drives connected to the motherboard



what you can do is turn off system,remove the power from dvd/cd drives and reboot
what you are left with is hard drives, remove one at a time to identify the primary slave...take out and replace


long winded i know but hope some of it may help you

albertross_2

Try running chkdsk d: /r /f

then backup any data

jem16

Thanks.

I know I could find out from the bios or on boot up but was hoping just to find out from within Windows.

Looking through Administrative Tools seemed to have narrowed it down. Event viewer shows it's HD1. Computer Management shows Drive 1 as my E drive so I think it's that. I will however check as you have both suggested.

One drive is a SATA drive. Presumably the fault lies with the drive connected to the IDE controller as that's what's usually called primary slave?

apintofstella

Try DiskCheckup - d/l from:

http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm