Primary Master Hard Disk Failure IDE Hard Disk Error and Recovery

IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) is a commonly used hard drive interface. Motherboards are generally provided with two IDE connectors, IDE0 (Primary IDE) and IDE1 (Secondary IDE). To each of the IDE connector, we can attach two devices at the maximum, where one is given the highest priority and referred as Master Drive while the second one is given low priority and is referred as Slave drive. But sometimes, system prompts that it can't recognize the IDE hard drive as it has failed. These are the cases when Hard Disk Recovery becomes necessary to retrieve lost data.

One of the symptoms that it shows, while hard disk failure is the occurrence of error messages as:
"Primary Master Hard Disk Failure"

As the error message suggests, system is referring to failure of primary master hard drive. It is also sometimes denoted as drive 0, which is entirely dependent upon number of drives installed and BIOS type.

Cause of Error Message:

Hard disk has failed to correctly communicate with the system, most likely due to physical failure. The corresponding causes could be: read/write head crash, actuator arm failure, spindle motor crash, disk controller problems, firmware corruption or electronic issues. In few cases, bad cabling could also be a root cause for this error message. These cables may turn faulty due to issues like heat, wear and tear etc.

Solution

Users are required to consider following solutions:
o If hard disk has gone physically bad, system user should immediately turn it off. The hard drive should be replaced with a new one and data can be restored from a recent backup on the new drive. If backup is unavailable or faulty, Data Recovery service can serve the purpose of optimum recovery.

o If bad cabling is the issue, user can replace the faulty cables with new ones.