I found an odd problem the other day:

Customers PC gives a boot device not found error.

Bios detects 1 HDD and 2 CDROMS… but then proceeds the say samsung XXXX hard dive “has fault”. Proceeding beyond this gives a boot device not found error.

I figure either a broken HDD, or a loose cable.

When I open the PC, I notice 2 hard drives on IDE0, and the 2 CDROMS are on IDE1.

Hmmm, one of the hard drives is not being detected.

I unplug the first HDD, and the second is detected by the bios. I unplug the second HDD, and plug in the first… and the first is detected by the bios…

OK, the HDDs are fine.

But why have they suddenly stopped working “together”?

I pull them out, and I see that the first HDD has jumpers set to force it to be master, but its plugged into the slave socket on the IDE ribbon cable. The second HDD is obviously connected to master socket, and has jumpers forcing it to be a slave.

OK, I swap the drives around, so that master is plugged into the master socket, and slave is plugged into the slave socket… after all that, the PC boots up as if nothing happened.

Normally, I would have gone for the cable select jumpering, but I didn’t want to waste time “folding” ribbon cables to make them fit the tight space inside the PC, so I decided to leave the drive jumpers as they were.