No idea what is going on... I've got 3 hard drives, 2 WD and 1 Maxtor, all 40 GB. I installed Fedora Core 2 with Maxtor for /home. Whenever I restart the computer POST reports "Secondary Master Drive failed" which is the Maxtor. I should note that when Fedora is shutting down and gets to the part where it shuts down the hard drives there is some clicking noise from Maxtor, and I hear the same clicking noise during post. The problem is that it ONLY happens after the shutdown, if I turn computer off and back on everything is fine. At the moment I'm running PowerMax tool from Maxtor to check the drive, but so far everything passed, doing the burn in right now. Any ideas???

If I had to take a guess (which I do, LOL) I'd say it's probably the secondary slave device (likely a CD or DVD drive) that's causing the problem with your Maxtor HDD. Not all IDE devices can co-exist on the same channel well with one another, especially if they use different transfer modes.

I do have an old plextor cd-rw as a slave so you might be right. I'll test it out tomorrow, but then I guess I'll just have to do without a third drive, can't get rid of the cds...

You can try switching the CD-RW to master and the hard drive to slave to see if it fixes. The Maxtor hard drive might be failing soon. I suggest backing up the files on that hard drive as soon as possible and then buy a replacement hard drive. Either Hitachi/IBM or Western Digital.

Maxtor hard drives are known to not work well on the same IDE channel with other drives.