Which drive is experiencing SMART failure?

[TSN79]

I recently got the following message during booting;

"Smart failure on Primary IDE Channel 3. Back-up your data, Disk drive failure may be imminent"

I've dealt with this problem previously, only problem now is I have two HD drives. How do I know which one this concerns?

 

[montoyas7940]

IDE drives will have small jumpers on the end to configure them as primary or secondary. You can compare them to the diagram on the drive label.

I am not sure about three IDE channels, most computers will have IDE 0 and IDE 1.
The ribbon cable will be plugged into the motherboard; it may be labeled at the connector.

 

[technutz]

The simplest way is to disconnect one drive at a time from the ribbon cable. If the error goes away you know that it must be the last drive you disconnected. Reconnect that drive to confirm that it is and then you can replace it.