PC : what are pri slave and sec slave?

[admylin]

My computer is on it's last legs. When I switch on I'm told pri slave : not detected and sec slave : not detected.

It eventually switches on but takes ages. Doe sit sound fixable? I've removed all photos, word pad and works to try and make space.

Primary and secondary slave hard drives. How many hard drives have you got/had?

No idea! I thought I had one. Have I deleted something maybe and that's why it says not detected?
We've ordered a new computer today and I will give the old one to a computer geek who will unscrew it and try to fix it!

The 'not detected' messages are normal if you've only got one hard disk drive, but they would normally flash past so quickly you wouldn't see them. If it's pausing at that point it may be that your hard disk is failing. Can you hear any buzzes or clicks while you wait for it to boot up?

Yes it's failing. I have to reboot about 10 times to switch on and it gets stuck sometimes too and I have to reboot again. It also goes on if I switch on then leave it for 20 minutes then reboot - then windows comes on.

You need to get a new hard disk and either transfer everything onto it using a disk copy program or start from scratch with a new installation of windows. If there's anything on there that you can't afford to lose you should copy it off asap as it could fail permanently at any time.

Is that easy to do - meaning straight forward? I have saved everything like documents and photos on an external hard drive.

If you want to start from scratch you would just replace your existing disk with a new one and reinstall everything. Obviously you would need the installation disks for windows and your other software. Swapping the disk is just a screwdriver job.

To copy the old disk onto a new one you would have to get both connected at once and run some disk copy software like this. Personally I would have a go at doing it this way. If it goes wrong you can still start from scratch.