HDD dying ???

The bios should sound one quick tone: beep, during the final phase of POST.
That's all. The audible is for the user to hear, if you don't hear it,
there's something wrong. If you hear more than one "beep", there's
something wrong.

Not all PCs have a single speaker directly connected to the motherboard for
this purpose.

Never seen a bios message requesting hard drive swap on the primary cable.
May be a cable select sensing problem if so. Or possibly you mean the boot
partition wasn't found on the master, thus the message.
--
Lil' Dave
Beware the rule quoters, the corp mindset, the Borg
Else you will be absorbed
"Johnnie Scott" <john374999,,,,,@.nospam.ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:P0o9f.21179$6i4.1685@newsfe7-gui.ntli.net...
> Is there a tell tale sign when a hard disc is about to give up. When
> starting my machine sometimes it will not boot and asks to swap the slave
> for the main disc. Usually after a second try all is OK. The bios beep
> sound different
> Thanks
> John
>
>
>
 >> Stay informed about: HDD dying ??? 

Enter cmd in the Start => Run box and then enter chkdsk /?

You are provided with all of the switches that can be used with XP's
disk-checking utility.

Entering chkdsk /r at the C:\> prompt checks the C: drive, reports bad
sectors and fixes problems. You might have to agree to a scheduled check that
will check the drive on the next boot.

You should also enter the BIOS and enable the SMART feature if it is there.
That reports if the drive is failing well before a failure occurs.

Eric,
PC Buyer Beware!
http://www.pcbuyerbeware.co.uk/

"Johnnie Scott" wrote:

> Is there a tell tale sign when a hard disc is about to give up. When
> starting my machine sometimes it will not boot and asks to swap the slave
> for the main disc. Usually after a second try all is OK. The bios beep
> sound different
> Thanks
> John
>
>
>
>
 >> Stay informed about: HDD dying ??? 

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 12:23:11 GMT, "Johnnie Scott"
<john374999,,,,,@.nospam.ntlworld.com> wrote:

>Is there a tell tale sign when a hard disc is about to give up. When
>starting my machine sometimes it will not boot and asks to swap the slave
>for the main disc. Usually after a second try all is OK. The bios beep
>sound different
>Thanks
>John
>
>
I have noticed that just before dying HDDs get abnormally noisy and
sometimes you get a very noticeable "clunk wirrr wirrrr CLUNK
wirrrwirrr" etc it sounds quite alarming then it dies and you get your
XP CD out + your backup image which of course you increment on a daily
basis don't you?

More often they just die on startup probably from shock at being asked
to spin up to a ridiculous rpm from stone cold when they are not
feeling very well.

Jonah
 >> Stay informed about: HDD dying ???