Quick Question And Need Help

[David]

I have a HP Pavilion 503n and all of the sudden the secondary ide channel stopped working. This puts me in a dilema because I was getting ready to do a fresh install of all of my operating systems. If anyone has any idea of what the problem could be let me know. I tried swaping the primary and secondary cables on the MB and the Optical drives worked fine and the harddrives were not detected. If you have any insight would be much appreciated. I am really not into the hardware side of a computer. I upgrade and that is it. None of this diagnostic stuff. LOL 

--
It's a good thing Linux is under GPL (General Public Lisense) or Microsoft would buy opensouce projects out too!
---
Hac-Dan