Hi Paul,

I can't quite figure out the timeline of events you describe. Did it work
once as a secondary slave on the new computer, now it won't? Did anything
else change since the time it worked? Are the jumpers set properly
(master/slave)?

Russ Poffenberger
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-----Original Message-----
From: PCBUILD - Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Paul Jones
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2004 8:32 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [PCBUILD] Hard drive failure--no 80 conductor cable


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.

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