hey my system has a slave and a master hdd. the slave is about 5 yrs old. i got the master last yr cus sector 0 on the slave is corrupted. latley whenever i turn on the pc, a clicking sound comes from the slave and then i get a message that says SEC SLAVE HDD ERROR, and it says press F1 to resume. after this it goes to the boot screen and boots up. after loading, my master hdd is nowhere to be found. not in my computer, hardware management and i cant run D:\, not finding it. please help me i need to kno the problems here before anything worse happens. all my data is on the slave, which i cant afford to lose. thx

What you are hearing is referred to as the click of death.

Are you sure that the noise is coming from the old hdd?

yes its coming from the old hdd, cus when i listen to it, the sound comes from it, plus when im booting, it says sec slave error, the old hdd is the slave

What are you seeing in the BIOS? Are both drives listed?

ok i just got it worked out tonite. i thought that i was using the slave to store everything else and just booting from the master. my bad. turned out i was booting and using the master for everything. i think the slave is dead seeing thats its 5 yrs old. but it used to be listed as a drive up till last month...i dunno why it decided to konk out. now it isnt listed anywhere, and in the BIOS it just checks, finds the master but tells me slave error after a lot of clicks, and continues to boot...is there anyway i can get it back? cus my other hdd only has 11 out of 80GB free. and i need to back up.
thx for the help.

Go to the hdd's manufacturer and download their diagnostic tool, most of these will want this transfered to a floppy drive to boot from. You may need to change the boot order so that the floppy is seen first in the POST.

Disconnect your newer hdd, change the jumper and IDE cable so that the older hdd is the master. This way you won't make any mistakes about which one you're testing.

With a hdd that old and a known bad sector I wouldn't hold my breath on this one.