Hey guys,

A friend recommended this site to me last year, and I bookmarked the link, hoping never to have to use it. But sadly TODAY I have a problem I could use some help with.

Last night my Acer desktop PC was working fine, but this morning it isn't.

When powering up, the Acer splash screen gets displayed for longer than usual, then an American Megatrends message appears. The relevant details seem to be...

Auto-detecting Pri Master..ATAPI CDROM
Auto-detecting Sec Slave....IDE Hard Disk
Pri Master : ATAPI DVD A DH16A6S YA17
Ultra DMA Mode-5
Secondary Slave Hard Disk Error

(There's also some stuff about the USB devices).

Is this terminal? Can you recommend a good resource for explaining how to diagnose the problem? If I REPLACE the hard disk, is it possible to retrieve the data from the original? (Fortunately not too much isn't already backed up). Is there any more info you need?

Thanks in advanceYour hard drive should be set as Master and your CD-ROM as slave, not vice versa.


Can you put the drive as slave into another PC to verify whether it works? Were there any abnormal INCIDENTS before this problem occured?Thanks for your quick reply.

Yes, something abnormal MUST have happened. When I went to bed the PC was running an AutoIt script which should have kept the PC occupied all night (taking screen shots of a Flash application intermittently), but we I woke up, the PC was powered down.

I need to go to work shortly, so I won't be able to try swapping out the drive until later, maybe tomorrow. I'll let you knowQuote

Yes, something abnormal must have happened. When I went to bed the PC was running an AutoIt script which should have kept the PC occupied all night (taking screen shots of a Flash application intermittently), but we I woke up, the PC was powered down.