primary master fails

[goaliman12]

the problem im having is that when the computer boots up, it says 'primary master fails', what happened was my main hard drive failed, so i switched that little wire thing to the other hard, trying to make it my master, but now this message comes up. i have primaryh master set to auto in bios....any ideas?
thanks
matt collinsworth

[S.D.Willie]

you have to boot the machine with the hard drive with the operating system on it.

sounds like you need to jumper the drives properly. one needs to be master(drive with O/S on it), the other slave. what wire are you talking about? the IDE (usually grey colored) cable? in most cases that wont matter with the cable position. you need to look at the drive itself and set the proper drive for "master" most drives show you the way to put the jumpers

here's a rough idea of what i mean. its a cdrom, but youll get the idea.

[wju425]

You might have the jumper on the other drive set to slave.

\o/ Billy