Toshiba Tecra A2. There is a serious error with the HDD. It wont boot up. I have connected the HDD to a PC as a Secondary Master drive and when this PC boots up it has the message Serious Error with Secondary Master HDD. Press F1 to continue. Pressing F1 evenutally loads XP but the HDD cannot be seen in My Computer or Disk Manager.

old Optiplex. are you sure its a 380 , as they have SATA drives.
NO OS stated, on this desktop
nor what case size you have of the 3(and 3 motherboards)
DT/MT/or SSF?
but IDE drive failure is that. and not really there.
no symptoms stated, wont boot unstated windows? or linux?

the word secondary is IDE old tech. (very odd that)
this PCs motherboard uses a ICH7 south bridge.
and has one unused IDE port.

dell forums show no hits for this.
my guess bios bug this, the bios tries to scan
the vestigial IDE port.

open the case
and tell the helper what is in this PCI slots.
only then can there be any IDE cards there, if there.
The dell 380 has no IDE ports.(no mobo jacks at all IDE)
but the bios may be old and is buggy
and when the HDD goes dead,
it scans all SATA ports first, then goes to some legacy echo failure "Secondary master " IDE failure.


that is way as asked if the BOOTS ok(I bet NO)
this pc is 9 year old, HDD do fail that old, super common that.

in any event if windows does not boot, the hDD is dead
or fully infected, with virus./corrupted.
we test the HDD next, every time, ask.

power on and go into BIOS and see if you main HDD shows up; and is #1 in the boot order.
i may show up missing, and is dead HDD
or the HDD motor is silent,a dead HDD.

take out battery turn on unit if you get no power its one of 2 issues either the power connection to board or adapter try adapter 1st then if it doesn't start you may have more serious issues start shopping oh yea could also be a bad ram simm

the pig

if screen glows and bios not locked, value is $10 ? hdd dead and or missing. if hdd good add $5 to value, why own this?

When booting you laptop notice the Toshiba scree. As that screen displays with the option F2 or F10. With your XP cd in the DVD/CD drive choose F10 and set your boot device to DVD/CD.
And follow the onscreen prompts.
Hope that helps.

You need to partition and Format this drive before you can do what you want.

how did you get here,?,go to the support site download the drivers (save) to desktop,burn them on data cd,or drag onto flash drive,then put it in the toshiba

Put the disk in the drive and restart the machine, when the toshiba logo appears press F12 and use the cursor key to select CD/DVD and hit enter.
See if it lets you boot from the CD/DVD drive.
Please keep me informed and good luck.

On boot up hit and hold Esc key until it goes to bios settings.

is this the original hard drive
for boot options while in restart constantly press F7 a menu will come up high light your boot choice
you may need to run windows on the hard drive again

yes if u can connect it wd the a server wd a port thn there is no need of hdd ..the main thing is u sould have a server near by