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Secondary HDC Failure

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by hotsticks5 1 view

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Hello
I'm currently working on a computer for a friend's mother and it is giving me a "Secondary HDC Failure, Press F1 to Continue" error message.

This happens after the Primary Hard Drive is detected.
There is only 1 Hard Drive on the computer, and only 1 CD-ROM. The Hard Drive is on IDE1 and the CD-ROM on IDE2.

I replaced the CD-ROM cable. I removed the CD-ROM cable. I attached a different CD-ROM. They all continued to give me the same error.

I also replaced the Hard Drive cable, while leaving the CD-ROM connected, and I tried again with the CD-ROM disconnected.

I am at a total loss of what to do. With every trial, after the error message, I pressed F1 and the system would hang after giving me the system information.
This computer is using an AMI BIOS and the identification number is 1770 (Acer). I am unaware of how to get to the BIOS to try to play around with the options because I think the system is hanging before it prompts me to enter the BIOS.

If anyone could possibly offer their help to the solution of this problem, it would be GREATLY appreciated. Also, if anyone knows what key to press to get into the AMI BIOS, it would GREATLY help out too.

I hope I was as detailed as possible.

Thanks,
Nick

9 replies

by sfc_gijoe

Most systems you will hit DEL, F1, or F2 as the system comes on. Once in the BIOS you should have an option to Auto-Detect Hard drives.

by dmiles

Boot the computer and when the startup screen appears,look in the lower left corner and you will notice the key to press to enter setup

Boot the computer into safe mode and open the control panel and double-click the system icon and in the devicemanager panel check the hard disk drive controllers and see if the secondary hard disk drive controller is installed on the system,load the driver from the manufacturers OS disk to reinstall the driver.

Once you open the bios setup panel,check the configuration to see if the dual-fifo is enabled

by briantruitt

Chances are that the bios wants an actual hard drive as the master on the secondary IDE channel. Make sure the cdrom is set as the slave on the secondary IDE and the bios is set to auto.

by 1stladytech

You are actually getting past the place to enter bios. All the above suggestions are correct, just try hitting the Del, F1, F2 etc key while the memory is counting up (or while the manufactorers splash screen is displayed). Once in Bios, check thegeneral options, and make sure that all drives are set to autodetect. It sounds like there was a hdd on the second channel at one time, and it was set to user specs. Once you reset the autodetect option, save and reboot, that should let you go past the error.

Good luck,

Vickie

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