master on primary will not spin up if master on secondary connected

[CA1240417]

deskpro END/P650/10/9/64/US
original wd 10gig drive on primary controller.
no matter what type of drive (cdrw/cd/4gig hd)
whenever i put on the secondary controller, the master on primary will not spin up.
secondary is enabled in bios.
master on primary will power up if it is the only drive connected. but as soon as i put something (anything) on secondary... no go.
bios is 08/22/99
thank you in advance.

[CA1242214 · Accepted solution]

I can think of several possibilities. One - the power supply is starting to fail, or does not have enough wattage to support the additional hardware. Power supplies can gradually fail such that the machine will still run, but starts to have hardware problems. If it is not putting out enough power for all the components on the system you can have problems that are difficult to diagnose. Two - some problem on the motherboard with the IDE ports. Need an adapter card which will check hardware on the mobo. Three - a problem with the IDE controller on the hard drive. You could check some of these problems by putting the 10 GB WD drive in another PC and see if it still has the same problem. Also, I would tally up the wattage required by all the components on the system and then see if the power supply is marginal for that use. If so replace with one that is more powerful, if not have it tested at a computer repair facility.

[CA1240417]

I mistakenly posted this to the wrong forum. The thread is on the deskpro forum. The power supply was the first thought that came to mind as it is only 200w.
I think the problem was that the cable on the secondary controller was a regular 40pin. Today when I got it working I used an 80pin udma cable. Thanks again!!