It is possible to disable the Fujitsu slave drive in BIOS; it is possible to create a boot partition for Linux on the master drive; but neither of these will make Linux recognise the Fujitsu drive if it is not recognisable by the BIOS first. You could try the troubleshooting procedure I posted originally; if no joy there, read again point #3 in my post of 17 August. It doesn't look good for your Fujitsu drive.

Hi,
I will not pretend to know a lot about this, but I believe the first response (bad jumpering/BIOS) was correct. You appear to have done all that was suggested. You might go back to your HDD on the primary IDE channel and double check that the master setting is correct. On some of the old harddrives that I have, there is a master/single setting when the harddrive is used alone. It works fine as long as it is the only harddrive. When I add a second, the setting must be changed to another set of pins which correspond to master. This may not pertain to your situation. Thought I would mention this as I did not see it in any of the previous posts.

The final diagnosis is a screwed HDD

Ran a diagnostic program from fujitsu on it and it's faulty.

Thanks once again for the help

Ben