I was trying to reinstall my XP or run a recovery. But as soon as I boot up the PC, the bios does not recognise the hard drive and the cd drive. "primary drive not recognised. Secondary drive not recognised. It then says windows can not run recovery because the hard drive is not present. Please check that all cables are connect correctly and reboot your PC. Please help me!!

The first thing is to open the box and check all the connections. If the connections (power and data) are all good, then you may have a problem with drive controller, which is usually on the motherboard. This means either getting a new motherboard, a new drive controller or take it to a shop.

How can you do a recovery, if the cd or hard drive do not work? Is is running directly from the bios? Just curious, something must be working for this message to appear. Do you have information on the hard drive that you need to keep?

I agree with what Scott said about the connections, please make sure the power lead is removed when checking this. To check simply remove and replace each power (red, yellow & black wires) and data (usually grey ribbon type cables) one at once, being very careful to remember the exact way they were plugged in originally. Just pull out and re-insert straight away (oooer).

You could also have a problem with your hard drive if the cd drive is actually working, I say this because sometimes, a drive's settings can be left in the bios when it has been removed, this could be why it's saying "secondary drive not recognised" Therefore it could have been saying this for a while but you wouldn't have noticed because your computer booted properly.

Just some thoughts, please post back with any progress made!

Hi,
I would like to ask some simple questions, which will help before you try making any major changes.
Was your computer working normally before you tried to Restore or Reinstall?
Or, is this something that just started, and you wanted to try the Restore to try fixing it?
Did you make any changes to the computer that might have caused it not to read the drives?
Have you ever opened up a computer before? If not, please be very careful. Touch the sides of the computer before you touch anything inside. Static electricity could fry some of the computer components. You must release all static electricity from your body before you touch the inside components.

Kids installed a video game and the system blacked out. I then tried to run a system recovery but then the screen would just go black. I then open it up (yes I have opened a PC before and I was very careful). I removed the hard drive and then used the six startup disks for XP. I started showing on the monitor I reinstalled the hdd then on boot up it still says primary master - none, primary slave - none, secondary master - none, secondary slave - none.

Why would you open it in prep for a system recovery or even a reinstall? Can you test the hard drive in another PC?

I opened to isolate the hard drive, but the hard drive has been tested on other machine and is working fine.

I still don't understand what you mean by isolate and why you would. But if its working in another PC then it indicates there is damage to the cables or drive controller.

Are both the cd drive and Hard drive on the same cable? Maybe when you tested the drive in the other computer, you switched it to "slave" setting, if this is the case, and both drives are set as slave, neither would work!!


Can you try either drive one at once, with the other disconnected e.g. hard drive only, then cd drive only. If they both work alone, then the problem is with master/slave assignment. If you only have two drives the best option is to have a separate cable for each drive.

Also, if you only have one cable between two, try shifting it to the secondary IDE connector on the motherboard. If the primary socket has a problem this should still work and boot normally.