What's a secondary IDE channel?

[diurnal_lee]

More pertinently, why does its failure keep my computer from working? I woke up to this very unpleasant message Sunday morning, and have been offline since then, and likely will continue so until I can stop playing phone tag with the service technician.

If you need to get a hold of me, a few of the ottawa_slashers gang have my number

Comments

[duncanmac]

That comment is on a par with "Who's General Failure and why is he reading my disk drive?"

It sounds as if your hard drive controller has gone the way of the dinosaurs. You may be lucky and simply need to replace one of the "ribbon" cables connecting a drive to the controller. If not, it could mean your PC's motherboard is toast. :-(