"Richard Alexander" wrote in message
om...
"Helene" wrote in message
...
Here is my latest update on the problem: There is no second hard drive,
so,
as Philo said, the "not detected" message means nothing.

There may not be a second hard drive, but it is likely that there is a
second IDE drive, at least a CD-ROM.

BTW, you never did tell us... when did this problem become noticeable
to you? Did she just buy this machine, and it did this out of the box?
Or, did someone upgrade it or reconfigure it recently? For example,
did someone add or remove a CD-ROM drive (not the disk, but the entire
drive), a CD burner, a DVD drive or a DVD burner? Did anyone open up
the case of the computer for any reason at all before this problem
became noticeable?

So, I guess that has nothing to do with the problem she is having.

As you can tell, I believe it does.

She has a Gateway
computer. It goes to GoBack and then just sits at the window where it
says
to hit the spacebar to make repairs. It says still waiting... and never
goes
any further.

Nor will it.

I have tried to get to the c:\ prompt to run a scandisk, but
can't figure out how to do it on a Gateway.

If this is caused by a Master/Slave conflict, you won't be able to get
to a prompt, unless Gateway has done something really wacky with the
BIOS (I can't rule that out). This is simply the behavior of the
parallel IDE system. When we all go to serial IDE (SATA), this won't
happen anymore, because SATA does not use jumpers.

I have gone through the manual
and don't see instructions either. Could you please help me? I'm afraid
my
friend doesn't have a startup disk either, which I know is dumb (before
you
mention it first...LOL).

Below is an instruction guide for setting the jumpers on a hard drive.
The same idea works on optical drives, such as CD-ROM and DVD drives.
Note, again, that each manufacturer has their own jumper settings, so
don't just imitate the positions of the jumpers in the pictures.
Follow the diagrams on all your drives.

http://www.harddriveupgrade.com/jumper_pins.shtml

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/di..._settings.html

Thanks again for trying to help me. This computer is probably 4 years old.
No changes have been made at all. It simple stopped working. The cd-rom is
set for another channel other than Primary Slave.

Helene