boot from secondary IDE controller

[Ice9]

Is this possible?
Last night my pc froze completely, I tried to reboot but it stayed like forever on the first screen.
Hit DEL to enter stup, waited for about 10 minutes for the BIOS screen to show, only to see "PRIMARY IDE NOT INSTALLED" so apparently my primary IDE controller died last night.
Could I plug my hard drive on IDE2 and boot from that controller?

On a side-note, I'm about to buy a new PC and I'm not inclined to buy from Dell anymore, does anyone here have any positive experience with HP Pavilion Core 2 Duo pc's?

Thanks.

[Void Main]

That sounds more like a dead hard drive to me. Try sticking it in another machine and see if you can access it before pulling your hair out trying to get it to boot on that machine.

[Ice9]

That's what I first thought too, but I have 2 hard drives plugged into the IDE controller and none of them show up during boot sequence.
Plus In opened the case and I can feel the master hard drive spinning
But I'll try to see if I can find a spare IDE connection on one of the other machines

[Ice9]

Turns out Void was right once again, it was a faulty drive.
hda is fine but as soon as i plug in hdb the pc won't boot.
Is there any way I could try to get back what's on there?
That drive doesn't contain anything crucial that wasn't backed up but there are a couple of convenient things I'd like not to have to download again :/

Would an external enclosure have a chance to work?
Are there tools I could unleash on the drive?

[Void Main]

I really doubt it. I have seen drives do that in the past and it's usually completely gone at that point. It's not that the platters themselves have failed but something in the IDE electronics. I believe the only way you could recover data from the drive at this point would be to send the drive off to one of those places specializing in recovering data from dead drives. I have done this before at work and I am sure they could recover your data but the problem with this is it is very expensive. We sent in several disks that were part of a RAIDSET that got f00ked and they got all of our important info off of them. Backup, backup, backup. :)