"Primary Master drive fails..."

[obrie572]

So here's an interesting issue I hope someone can provide me insight on. I've dealt with many hard drive failures in the past, and yet I've never quite run into something like this.

I'll introduce the problem by first saying that the computer has been running flawlessly for 6 months now. It's a custom built PC. Specs:
* AMD Athlon XP 2100
* Maxtor 6Y060L0
* Asus A7V333
* 762MB RAM
* XFX GeForce 6600

My problems started after some water got spilled near the computer a few days ago. I immediately cut off power to the computer and moved it away from the water. Since then, I've been having problems.. here's the deal...

When booting up the computer, I get an error during the BIOS screen...

"Primary master drive fails"

I initially checked all connections, verified all components were secured properly, etc. No dice. I threw the hard drive into a spare computer. No dice either. Similar error message (though slightly different because it's a different BIOS). I then changed ito to slave and booted up the primary drive on my spare computer. I was able to read all of the data and back it up onto another hard drive.

So at this point we have:
* "Primary master drive fails" - Can't boot up onto the hard drive, but...
* I can read the hard drive from another computer

So I tried loading in MaxBlast 4 and seeing if it could diagnose some problems. When loading up the utilities, MaxBlast told me:

"The BIOS for the Primary Master drive is set to None or Off....To modify the BIOS settings, watch the display as you boot this machine for the key sequence that allows you to edit or change system settings. In the BIOS settings, change the Primary Master position to "Auto"."

Well, I checked the BIOS and everything looked fine. BIOS is recognizing the hard drive is there, no problems. I followed other recommendations by Maxtor and changed the hard drive to be the Secondary Master. I could now get to the utilities in MaxBlast.

First, I zeroed out the drive, and then ran both the advanced test and the burn-in test. Both tests passed with flying colors. I rebooted the machine, and... no dice. Same error message.

It appears as though I've run out of ideas. I don't get it. I can read from the hard drive, but something is causing both my original and spare computers to give a "Primary master drive fails..." error. And MaxBlast says everything's okay! Anyone out there that can explain this conundrum?!

 

[obrie572]

In case it helps, when I try to install Ubuntu onto the hard drive, it gives the following errors:

[17179696.888000] Buffer I/O error on device hdc, logical block 0
[17179701.800000] Buffer I/O error on device hdc, logical block 0
...and so on and so forth...

until it just stops trying.

 

[obrie572]

Well, scratch the "Buffer I/O" errors... those were just problems because the CD went bad.

 

[amddude]

What filesystem is the drive formatted for? If it's NTFS, try doing chkdsk X: /f from windows if the drive is a slave, or chkdsk X: /r from a windows cd

 

[obrie572]

Well, I went ahead and ran the Maxtor PowerMax diagnostics tool and found something interesting. Upon running the "Installation Confirmation" test, It gives me the following results...

Power Connection.................. Passed
Interface Cable Connection.... Passed
Master/Slave Jumpers............ Passed
BIOS Extension support.......... Failed
Partition Information.............. Present

So now the next thing is figuring out whether I can fix the BIOS Extension support. Any ideas?