Physical Memory Dump, HD doesn't work

[tmaclean]

I have two hard drives, one is a Maxtor 250GB and the other is a Hitachi 80GB. The 250 was the primary and the 80 was the slave. Everything worked fine together until one day I came to my computer and there was randomly a blue screen of death saying that all my physical memory had been dumped. I'm still not quite sure what that means, but anyways, my primary works fine and I'm able to boot up Windows just fine, but when I have the slave connected, I'm not able to start up my computer. The 80 makes a clicking/spinning sound and does nothing. My question is, how is a slave able to take over like that and disable my computer from starting properly? From what I thought, a slave is secondary and if it doesn't work, you wouldn't be able to use this drive. Not take the entire computer down with it. I have a good amount of files on there I would like to get back also, so can someone tell me how I could get my computer to boot up with both hard drives connected? I'm not sure if I were to get it to boot up if it would even have anything on it, but it's like I can't do anything with it. Not even format it if I didn't care about the files. Thank you very much to any help anybody offers.

[doctorgonzo]

Master/Slave doesn't mean anything other than "Drive 1" and "Drive 2", so it's not like the slave drive is really "secondary" in how it works. If the drive is seriously hosed, then it could prevent your computer from booting up by sending garbled information to the motherboard.

Clicking noises are not good. You could try putting it in another computer to see if that motherboard is less finicky.

[glc]

Download Hitachi Drive Fitness Test and test the drive. It runs from a bootable floppy or CD.