Desktop

Check the power and IDE cables to your hard drive and CD drive.

A failure for detecting the primary slave is common as most systems do not have a drive connected as the slave to the master hard drive.

You can disable the detection of all unused drives in BIOS settings.
This will stop the message, and speed up the boot process.

The primary master is 'usually' the boot or C: drive.
The not detected warning could be acceptable IF you have a special program installed to allow a large hard drive to work on an older PC.

Chas

First did this work before and suddenly stop working? If it did then the drive may have just plain failed. You can open the box remove the drive, get the parameters written on it, reinstall the drive go to BIOS setup and select the USER DEFINED settings and enter those parameters. If you cannot get these parameters and you know the size of the drive select a set of parameters thats that size or close but less than and reboot. I do not think this will help if the thing was working before but you can try removing the jumpers on the back of the drive and see what happens. You can also try a boot disk and fdisk the drive (probably wont work either but what thew ****). You may have a controller problem. If it is onboard then you have an excuse to replace the Motherboard and upgrade at the same time. If you can locate an IDE controller board then you can install it and run the drive off that. It is either a defective drive or controller board.

Prices on a new HD.

Check in the Bios and see if it sees the HD, if not try answer # 2 but with most of the Bios used with ME they are auto-loading depending on what the HD says it is. Thus it appears that the board on the HD is not communicating with the Bios.

Had one that did just that (HD was interferring with all drives on pri) replaced drive and works fine, only bummer is lost all files on the old HD.

try a diffent IDE cable to check for control failure. #2 make sure you have your drives set up
right master for the master slave for slave exct.