My spare PC (one of them) suddenly has started sometimes not to boot, the BIOS doesn't detect the hard drive (master) but detects slave (thats in a caddy as I use a hard drive for storing music and it goes between 2 PC's) .. if I unplug it and leave it a while it will find the hard drive no problem and boot up fine..............I've run online tests on the hard drive at seagates site and all comes back fine once its running its fine no problems

Sounds like one of a few things.

The ribbon could be damaged slightly after the slave, but before the master.

The hard drive might not be spinning up in time for the BIOS check.

The firmware on the drive might be a little bit dogdy.

Just a few ideas for now.



Regards
_____
Meck

Good suggestions. Do you know if there's a 'Hard Disk Pre-Delay' option in your BIOS Brain Damage?

I seem to think its the cable as it's only just started after I installed the caddy and the cable is a little stretched..

It does have the SMART enabled and that never comes up with any errors when it boots

Thanks for the input