Hello PCbuilders:

I was a subscriber years ago while teaching a PC hardware course at a tech
school, so I know this is the place for the straight scoop on my problem.

I have an old (couple years, maybe) Seagate 40 GB hard drive that was
running Windows 98 on my old PC.  Got a new Compaq a couple of months ago
and once it was set up, I installed the old Seagate as the secondary slave
to copy all our data over to the new drive that came with the Compaq.

I had copied what I knew we needed, and told my wife to get what she
needed.  "No big hurry," I said.  In the past, I used to have two drives
installed at all times on our system.  When Windows got ornery I would wipe
out the secondary drive, format it, and move cables/jumpers as necessary to
make it the primary master then re-install Windows and applications.  What
was the primary (boot) became the secondary drive and we copied data over
at our leisure.  I'd repeat the process in a year or so.  Worked great for
years!

Well, to our surprise, our new system wouldn't boot.  Just hung on boot
with a blank screen.  I tried everything I knew to track down the culprit
and eventually saw the error "Secondary Slave, No 80 conductor cable" (or
something like that).  I knew that wasn't really the problem, but gave it
an 80-conductor cable just to see if it would be happy.  Tried it out on
the old PC (now in my son's room).  No luck (also hung on boot, -Win98
BTW).  Oh well, guess we don't have the old drive any more.  "You got all
the stuff you needed, right?" I ask (assume, bad me!).  Wrong.

So, I'm pretty sure the problem is in the on-board controller.  Do you guys
think I can get a VERY similar drive off eBay and swap controllers?  How
similar do they have to be?  Model # needs to be identical, I am sure.  But
what about firmware?

Specifics of the drive:
Seagate U6 Model ST340810A
P/N: 9T7002-304
HDA P/N: 100188744
Config code: U2P-02
Config level: DSMF1
Firmware: 3.39

If we need to we will spend the $$ to recover the data because of some
priceless pictures, but am willing to try something different first.

Thanks for your help!


Paul Jones
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